The Cinematheque

“A reflexive, imaginative reckoning with the death of a loved one … Poignant and formally intriguing … Slow, strange, beautiful.”

Sophia Satchell Baeza, Sight and Sound

A haunting meditation on grief through the prism of art, Montreal-based filmmaker Miryam Charles’s enigmatic and strikingly assured debut feature was one of the standout works of Canadian cinema in 2022. Charles, who has built an impressive body of abstract, experimental shorts over the past eight years, centres her ethereal film on a family trauma of almost unfathomable pain. In 2008, the director’s teenage cousin Tessa was found hanged in her room; the autopsy revealed she was raped and murdered. Cette maison relays this tragedy by way of a resurrected Tessa (Schelby Jean-Baptiste). Reunited with her mother (Florence Blain Mbaye), she reflects on her abbreviated existence and the woman she will never become. Employing heightened artifice, delicate 16mm photography, staged reenactments, and lived-in perspectives on the diasporic experience (Charles, like her cousin, is of Haitian descent), Cette maison offers a poignant, personal requiem for vanished lives—and solace, one hopes, for those living with the loss.

In French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles

TIFF Canada’s Top Ten 2022

One of the best films of 2022 (#33)
Sight and Sound

preceded by

Vole, vole tristesse
(Fly, Fly Sadness)
Canada/​Haiti 2015
Miryam Charles
6 min. DCP

Charles’s first short, a lyrical musing on an imagined nuclear explosion that erases the voices of an island’s people, established the analogue aesthetic and allegorical sensibilities of the gifted Haitian Canadian artist.

In French with English subtitles

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Drei Atlas
(Three Atlas)
Canada/​Haiti 2018
Miryam Charles
7 min. DCP

A housemaid is interrogated after the murder of her former employer in Charles’s beguiling 16mm short, which reckons with xenophobia through supernatural lore and the absence of onscreen characters.

In German and Haitian Creole with English subtitles