Freda

A production from the African diaspora, Gessica Geneus’ Creole-language debut feature is a celebration of female resilience underpinned by a vivid evocation of life in Haiti. Freda is a determined young university student, living with her family in a poor neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, where they run a small street shop. Faced with precarious living conditions, colonial legacies and the rise of violence, she must decide whether to stay in her deeply troubled country or seek a future elsewhere. Freda wants to believe in the future of her country.

Above all I wanted to show Haitian society from a female perspective because this perspective is generally overlooked. Women are underrepresented and the analysis of the situation of our country is monopolised by men. I wanted to do it through fiction because that’s how I began my acting career when I was 17. I wanted to portray female characters and try to understand their complexity, the complexity of making human choices, to show what men and women in Haiti face every day. To ask basic, concrete questions such as ‘How do we get by from day to day, and how do we keep going?’

Director Gessica Généus