Guetty Felin
Bio
I am a Haitian-American filmmaker who has shared her life between America, Haiti and France. My sensibility, vision and cinematic language have been highly influenced and shaped by my life experience in all three countries. I fell in love with cinema at a very early age at the drive-ins in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The “electric shadows” on that glowing screen were a stark contrast to our realities and yet they deeply connected us to the outside world. Cinema became my own little sanctuary, my personal way of filling those chasms that were wedged by an insidious political system. I began seeing my parents and the adults around me like characters in a film that I was incessantly crafting. Today, after several decades, a few documentaries (including Ayiti Mon Amour, Broken Stones and Closer to the Dream), some fiction shorts, three narrative screenplays, and a couple of beautiful babies later, cinema is an organic part of who I am. Cinema is how I engage the world around me, how I denounce social and political injustice, how I explore haunting themes such as memory, exile, foreignness, and the unending search for home, while interconnecting our common global humanities.
Reflection
For having shot two films in Haiti in the past 4 years, my motto had become expect the unexpected then let the magic of cinema take over. And what better place to expect magic or miracle, than at the foot of the regal waterfall of Saut d’Eau? On the very first day of the shoot, as we were setting up our first segment with Adeline (a pregnant woman we casted during our research trip), out of nowhere a young woman clad in an indigo blue dress with white ruffles walked into our frame. She saluted the waterfall with song and dance and then made her way to the main waterfall and exited our shot. Later, I decided to approach her. She told me that she was the daughter of Vierge Miracle (Our Lady of Mont Carmel the patron Saint of Saut d’Eau). 30 years ago her mom made a pilgrimage to the waterfall asking for a child and the following year on the Day of the Saint, July 16th, she was born.
It was like providence. Once again, I had surrendered to the Gods of cinema and it paid off. We were all completely charmed by Nadia and took great pleasure in filming her and listening to her unique story and songs and her sacred relationship with this mythical place.