The Haitian Trilogy: Una Sola Sangre
by Esery Mondesir
Canada/Cuba, 2018
synopsis
Through moments of work, rest, and celebration, the film produces a deceptively profound portrait of a family, a neighbourhood, and a nation. (Jesse Cummings)
Despite not seeing their father’s homeland until their sixth decades (and after the shooting of the film), the Galde family and their social position in Cuba has long been marked by their Haitianness – an identity they and their children negotiate in various ways throughout Mondesir’s generous and intimate documentary.
about the directors
Esery Mondesir is a Haitian-born, Toronto-based artist filmmaker. He worked as a high school teacher, a book designer, and a labour organizer before receiving an MFA in cinema production from York University (Toronto) in 2017. His work takes a critical stance on modern-day sociopolitical and cultural phenomena to suggest a reading of our society from its margins. Motivated by his own diasporic experience, Mondesir’s films draw from collective memory, official archives, vernacular records, and the Everyday to explore migration and exile as sites of identity formation as well as cultural resistance. His work has been shown in Canada and internationally. In 2016, he received the Lawrence Heisey Graduate Award in Fine Arts and, in 2017, he received the Paavo and Aino Lukkari Human Rights Award from the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at York University.
