Inspired by her family's history of migration from Haiti to Canada, Miryam Charles' films investigate the liminal spaces between narrative and place. Her textured 16mm shorts—including 2018’s Drei Atlas and 2021’s Songs for the New World—explore diaspora, identity, and displacement by weaving unconventional structures through sound and song, often layering text over observational cinematography of buildings and Caribbean landscapes. These sequences create a tension between the bodily utterances of spoken or sung word and the distance of the filmed images, and often resemble a call to an ancestral space. Not unlike music, they evoke a question-and-answer reverberation.
Charles' feature debut, This House (Cette Maison), made its world premiere at this year's Berlinale Forum and opened the Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami. In This House, Charles depicts this tension between the historical and the personal quite literally: by trying to make sense of a traumatic event and its effect on her family. As she revisits the true-crime story of her cousin Tessa, who was found hanged in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 2008, Charles examines the past causes and future consequences of her death by imagining an alternative biography. Charles speculates on the life that Tessa could have lived through fiction: we see her traveling to Haiti with her mother, learning about the traditions of Haitian trinkets, and sharing heritage dishes at dinner. Through “retracing” Tessa's potential steps, This House equally investigates the struggles of Charles' family and the Haitian community in Quebec, where Charles is based. In the film, we see Tessa and her family gathered in front of the television following the run-up to the 1995 Quebec referendum on independence from Canada. If the outcome reflected a majority leave vote, the predominantly French-speaking part with five million inhabitants would have become an independent country. However, Quebecers narrowly voted to remain by just 54.288 votes. “A lot of immigrants felt that if Quebec became a country, they wouldn't be in it,” Charles told me, recalling the tensions surrounding the referendum.
In situating these factual events alongside the fictionalized history of Tessa, Charles turns toward measuring the intricate reality of migration. Ultimately, by amplifying the visceral and personal, This House interrogates the patriarchal strategy of a temporal linearity of memory.
NOTEBOOK: In This House, we follow a personal tragedy that happened in your family. Can you talk about how your work on this film was informed by your autobiographical experience?
MIRYAM CHARLES: I would say that everything in the film was informed by my experience, even the little details in the art direction, the costumes. I actually took everything—from tragedy, but also from more joyous moments from my family history—and I put it in the film. A lot of things will only resonate with my family members through the décor or the set. I use a lot of objects from and inspired by my mom's house, my sister's house, and my aunt's house. The paintings that you see in the film, actually, everything—even some of the flowers in the garden scene are from my mother's garden. I surrounded myself with a lot of familiar objects to actually help me go through the process of making this film.
NOTEBOOK: You wove your personal experience into the film quite like material.
CHARLES: Yeah, exactly.
NOTEBOOK: We often recur to place and family in the film—expressed so evocatively with the ambiguity of the film's title, This House, which could address a place or a social “house” as in a family organization. Could you talk a little bit about the different modes of place on display here and the tension between security of place and the violence that can come with it by being emotionally or quite physically displaced from another?
CHARLES: I was first supposed to film the house where my cousin died, because it's still owned by my family. And very early in the process, I realized that I… I just couldn't do it. I went to Connecticut with one of my producers, and the moment I went inside the house to film inside, I couldn't, as it was too much for me. So, in the film, when you see the car driving around the streets, it's actually me trying to find the courage to go inside the house. I couldn't find it, so it didn't happen. But the title of the film came from the first idea that I had about the film, which was going inside a house to film its different rooms and then to finish with the room where my cousin died. And then the more I talked about this idea of the house, I came back to my own.
It was a sense of identity in a way, since I'm a child of immigrants from Haiti. When I was younger—and I think even now, but it is less intense, I would say—I was obsessed to find my place, to find my home, because in Canada, I felt Canadian, but I wasn't Canadian enough for the majority. When I would go to Haiti to visit my family, I wouldn't feel exactly Haitian either. I speak Haitian with a French accent, which always bothered me. So I tried to find my place, and I think it shows in the film and that idea of traveling to a different country, to different houses. I'm trying to convey that this house or the security that we need to feel comfortable with is mainly people and not really a specific place. If we look, for example, at the scene where the family members gather in a morgue, I had the option to create a realistic morgue. I went to visit a few morgues, with the idea to shoot in them. But from early on, I knew that this was going to be a fictional scene. For me, what happened in real life could not be contained inside the walls of my cousin's house. So I decided to put this scene in some kind of a blank space to try to express the intensity of the tragedy of that moment.
NOTEBOOK: In the later stages of the film, we see a family celebrating the majority "No" vote in Quebec’s 1995 referendum on independence from Canada. The celebrations of the "No" result come to them as a relief, a relief to not need to move again, to not again arrive in a place while equally being mentally ready to leave. You grew up in Laval and now live in Montréal—how does this notion interweave with the main themes of the film, namely displacement and identity?
CHARLES: The film has not been released in Quebec yet, so I'm waiting to see what people will think about it here. The producer of the film [Félix Dufour-Laperrière] is a good friend of mine, and when I pitched him this idea, Félix is really, you know, for the independence of Quebec and all his family are really into it, which I understand. And he was very surprised at my personal take on the issue and my family's take on it. But when I talked with some of my friends who come from immigrant families—they felt the same as I did at the time. So, this was some kind of a different perspective of the same event. A lot of immigrants felt that if Quebec became a country, they wouldn't be in it. It would have been much more difficult for them. They were ready to leave and go to another province—just in order to stay in Canada.
But also, you have to understand Canada's history at the same time. The history we were taught at school put Canada in a very positive light. And my parents came to Montréal in 1979, so they didn't have a strong Canadian history background. They were so grateful just to be there that they wanted to, you know, just stay there. Hence, there was a big relief in the Haitian community after the referendum. I also talked with a friend whose parents are from Vietnam and it was the same thing for them, too. There were a lot of racial tensions at the time that nobody wants to talk about even today. I think it will be interesting to see the reaction when the film is released in Quebec this October.
NOTEBOOK: In many of your earlier shorter works, you use poetry and song and juxtapose them with observational landscape shots of places you are connected with: Haiti, Scotland, to name but two. How do music and poetry inform your work process?
CHARLES: For all of my films I usually start from sound and music—even if it's maybe strange to say—because I originally started out as a cinematographer. You would think that images are very important to me, but not so much in my work. I always start with sound, and usually what I do is I record a lot of soundscapes and music. And when I start a project, I record voiceover narration, if there's narration, because for me, narration has a musical sense to it. Then I edit everything, and afterwards, place the image on top of the sound. That's how I create all of my films, because for me, if I can understand a story only through sound, it's actually easier. With images I feel like the possibilities are endless; editing images is a bit of a nightmare for me. But if I have a solid sound base, then I can allow it [to be] a guide to work myself through the images.
Another important element is music and singing, like the singing voice that appears in my film. This is a cultural ritual for me. Haitians will sing when they're happy, as well as when they're sad. You can tell by the way that people sing how they feel. So sometimes I will maybe look happy and I will hum a song and my mom would say—“Oh, I think something's not right.” And she always knows—and me too, I can hear it. My sister, my little cousin, even with my niece. So I think that I integrated all of this into my filmmaking. There's always a song. There's always somebody humming a song. It's very important to me. And in Cette Maison, I do a few of them. When the actress playing Tessa is singing a song in the film, it's the song that my mom used to sing to us to wake us up in the morning. Every morning when the four of us needed to go to school, she would go from room to room and wake us up, singing that same song.
NOTEBOOK: How did you choose to expand on your earlier short films by adding fictional elements like indoor sets, props, on-screen dialogue, and actors for This House?
CHARLES: I chose fiction because it was easier for me to tell the story that I wanted to tell than if I had done a documentary. I think I was not courageous enough to do interviews face-to-face and film family members. Everybody in my family is a bit like me—everybody is shy. I didn't want to put the camera in front of them to tell this story, which is a difficult story. But even with the more, I would say, joyful souvenirs or memories—I knew that it would have been a difficult moment for them and even for me. Choosing fiction really helped me to create some kind of distance, to actually find the courage to tell the story that I wanted to tell.
NOTEBOOK: There is a lot of symbolism in the film—displayed in its most powerful way in a scene where we see the superimposition of Tessa's body on a stretcher wrapped in the silhouette of white linen matching and merging into the silhouette of a mountain ridge of an island. How did you get to this idea of expressing family and memory in this concrete bio-geographical context through literally framing landscape and family together?
CHARLES: I would say that I realize that now. Maybe I didn't while I was doing the film because I thought that I was making a film about my cousin and her mother. But I was also telling a story about myself, because I see a lot of myself in the film and the way that I film landscape. Originally, I was supposed to go to Haiti to film all of the landscape scenes. It was my main goal. It was probably the reason why I wanted to do the film, because as my cousin died when she was fourteen, she never had the chance to go to Haiti herself. So, it was very important to me to symbolically go back together with her, in a way. But then the pandemic happened and the film insurance company wouldn't cover the crew entering Haiti. Also, the film is government-funded, and the branch of the government funding body told us not to go because it was too dangerous. Therefore, I decided with a heavy heart to go to Dominica and St. Lucia. So, all of the exteriors are actually not shot in Haiti.
I showed the film to a few Haitian friends, and from the first frame, they knew that it's not Haiti. But it's kind of Haiti for me. I made my peace with it, because personally, it adds to the nostalgia of the film and also a little bit to its sadness. The two characters always talk about going back. When they actually go back, they don't recognize anything. They look at a map and they are lost. For me, it was a way to tell that they're not really there. It was important to not try to transport them into a fake Haiti [where] they would say, “Oh yes, I know everything.” It was important for them to be lost because they're not really there.
NOTEBOOK: What you are saying perfectly ties into what the film does with moments in time. We constantly flit between different temporalities. Sometimes scenes are set as timeless tableaus—all actors dressed in black in the morgue, for example—and sometimes they look very “now,” like Tessa and her mother on their trip to explore Haiti. Anything could be now or then in this film.
CHARLES: I think you're right because there's a sentence that comes back a lot in the film—“everything is possible.” But I also realized that trauma can distort reality and memory, because when I worked on the film, I did a lot of research within my family, and we had different interpretations or perceptions of the same events. Here, I try to include my memories, but also the memories of my sisters and of my family members, and try to create something that seems confused but kind of makes sense to us all.
NOTEBOOK: It makes the story so alive that there is no linear history told here.
CHARLES: I remember the moment when I heard that my cousin had died. It was a very quick moment. I decided to refuse the reality of that moment. And I think this kind of shows also in the film: I'm trying to create an alternate reality because the character in the film is in her twenties—my cousin died at fourteen, and I tried to give her back those years that she never had, and the conversations that she could never have with her mother. I try not to watch the film anymore because each time that I watch it, I feel like she's there and she's alive. I know that it's strange. And the moment that the film finishes, I feel like I'm losing something or someone all over again. It's very weird because the film finishes with a rather joyful scene in a way, a family banquet scene. And each time I see the last frame, it is very weird for me.
NOTEBOOK: Somehow all these different temporalities culminate in that moment, framed through a table and food. And then you get these glimpses through the different dishes that Tessa points out. In another scene, Tessa is shown a Haitian trinket by her mother, consisting of things like fabric, images, and a tin soldier that Tessa so curiously picks up and gets rebuffed by her mum for having taken it. She says it is “not allowed to touch Haitian trinkets.” The symbolic value of trinkets evokes a nonlinear history writing, through being equally a menagerie of a past in the present, the reminder of a place in another place.
CHARLES: Yeah. I think it's very telling of Haitian culture. The trinkets represent different times, different periods in a family history. So, for me, it was really about honoring the culture. The banquet scene at the end shows that food is family in Haitian culture. And it's kind of strange because when I first wrote that scene, I knew that it was going to be the last scene of the film. I wrote it with a lot of people in mind, and I asked a lot of family members and friends to actually come and attend. But the pandemic happened, so people were a bit uncomfortable. And I totally understand that, because when I shot the scene, it was very early on in the pandemic. There was no vaccine, so people were a bit scared to gather together. The producer asked me if I wanted to wait, and I told him, no, I'm just going to shoot the scene with the two actresses. It's going to create some kind of a strange feeling, but also a very close moment between the mother and the daughter.
My sister and I chose all of the favorite dishes of people that I know and that my cousin also loved. And I also chose a special soup. It's called soup joumou. We eat it every first of the year to celebrate the year and the liberation from French colonial rule—to celebrate the fact that we're still alive. Back in the times of slavery, only masters were allowed to drink this soup, which was prepared by slaves. We cook that soup and then we share it between family members.
NOTEBOOK: And you eat it all together with the family.
CHARLES: Yeah, exactly. You cook a big pot, and then you put it in a smaller one, and then I travel around the city to go and give it to my sister. We exchange our soups.
NOTEBOOK: It's a nice gesture so that no one ever needs to stay hungry.
CHARLES: Yes, exactly.