Anything Is Possible Here: A Conversation with Miryam Charles

Lovingly arranged, like a home in perpetual preparation for visitors, Cette maison (This House) is a feature-length moving-image shrine to the living memory of Terra Alexis Wallace, cousin of Montreal-born Haitian Canadian director Miryam Charles. Terra, who was murdered at home in 2008 at the age of fourteen, is reimagined as Tessa (Schelby Jean-Baptiste), who returns from the afterlife to her heartbroken mother, Valeska (Florence Blain Mbaye), in their Connecticut family home. In this ornate experimental documentary, Charles presents meticulously gathered Haitian soundscapes, an assortment of Caribbean flora, precious keepsakes, and staged recollections. With these elements, she conjures a reunion across realms, showing a family that is still standing despite being profoundly changed by what they have suffered.

An experienced cinematographer, Charles directed several short films on the way to her feature debut, each one demonstrating her commitment to challenging the conventions of cinematic form. True to her meditative aesthetic, Cette maison marks the place where cinema and ceremony meet, bridging reminiscences with deeply researched fabulations and a mourner’s desire to hold on.

The film comes to the Criterion Channel this May after an impressive festival run, which included a world premiere at the 2022 Berlinale Forum and top prizes at IndieLisboa and the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. To mark the occasion, Charles and I spoke about what it was like to revisit such delicate family history, what inspires the way she tells stories, and the influences that have led to her experimentation with documentary form.

What was it like talking to your family for the project?: I thought, maybe a bit naively, that making this film would bring closure to our grieving process—that at the end our grief would be gone. But it didn’t happen that way. I think the film helped me understand that the grief will always stay with us. Now I’m at peace with that, knowing that we will always be suffering because of this, but that the film helps us to remember all the good things. She was not only somebody who was murdered; she was also somebody who lived, was loved, and loved us.

I told my family that it was not a film about the murder but a film about my cousin. They were very happy about it, actually.

I’ve learned that your filmmaking process begins with sound and that you start with an established sound archive that you then build from. Can you talk a bit about that process and the sort of sounds that you’re attracted to?: They’re mainly sounds of nature, wind. I’m obsessed with birds—so anytime that I can record them, I do. Sounds of the sea . . . and I think it’s linked to Ayiti [Haiti]. Each time I would go there, I wouldn’t take a lot of pictures, but I would always have an audio recording device, and I’ve been doing that for twenty years. I’d go there and record sound, not really knowing what I was going to do with it.

That really came in handy for Cette maison, since, for numerous reasons, we couldn’t shoot the film in Haiti. All the exterior images were shot in Dominica and Saint Lucia, but the sounds that you hear are from Haiti. All of the sounds that I had collected over the years are in the film, and for me, they are a connection with my parents’ country and with the country of my cousin’s mother.

When you went into your archive to start building your soundscape for Cette maison, what were you listening for?: A journey back to Haiti. Since I couldn’t actually go back, the sound of returning to Haiti was my main structure. When I wrote the script, I wrote everything that we hear in the scene. It was a bit strange for the actors, but it was a way to situate myself. I need to hear my environment before I can describe it. All of my short films were done that way. I write everything that we hear, and then I try to attach images to that.

Sound allows us more freedom in telling stories. In images, we automatically look for sense or purpose. We try to make connections with images. With sound, there’s a little bit of room. It’s okay [to hear it] not knowing exactly where you are or what’s happening. Your brain is more open that way.

Can you say a bit more about your process for developing the images? They are certainly as striking as the soundscapes. Tell us about the format you chose and the images you were looking for.: I was very happy when my producer told me that it was okay to shoot on film. Sometimes you tell people you want to shoot on 16 mm and they tell you it will be too expensive. I’m used to producing my own films, and I’m not rich, so I do one or two takes and that’s it. Even though my producer said we have the money, I stayed true to myself. I think the film is seventy-five or seventy-six minutes long, and I probably shot eighty-nine or ninety minutes total. When I sent it to the lab, they were like, “Uh, is this just the first part, or is there more?” I know what I want, and I told the actors, so everybody was prepared.

The visuals were [made through] a team effort. I sat down with the director of photography and the two production designers, one of whom was born in Haiti, so he understood all of the references. We borrowed a lot of objects from my mom’s house and from my family to try and recreate something that feels familiar. But for the studio scenes, it was important to me that it’s very clear that we are in a studio. Since it’s a film about memory reconstruction and fragmented memory, it was important that we see that the multiple houses are not complete. It’s a reflection of what I felt when I did the interviews with my family members. We were trying to remember an event, and we all had different memories of the same event, which is understandable. I tried to translate that in the way the film was shot.

Shooting in Dominica and Saint Lucia was bittersweet because I wanted so much to go to Haiti to shoot those images. It was important to me because my cousin never got to go back while she was alive. For me, the film was a way to go back with her.

I shot everything from some distance, but that wasn’t my original plan. I was going to go back to the village where her mom was born, to go in their house to meet with people. It would’ve been more . . . in French we say “vivant” [living]. Now it’s more haunted. I always say Cette maison is a bit of a ghost story.

I do! Morrison works to bring the character of Beloved back to life, almost as if she’s never really gone. And just as Beloved is able to speak in the novel, Tessa speaks throughout the film. Gosh, I’m thinking of that scene where she is still on the autopsy table. Tessa is speaking as you’re overlaying images of the environment. It reminded me so much of that sort of haunting, of that sort of ghost story.: Wow. I’m never going to live that down. I’m so honored. I love Toni Morrison; I love Beloved.

Well, on that note, what influences—cinematic, literary, sonic, musical—helped shape the project?: The first influence on the way that I constructed that film, and probably all of my other films, is my dad. Since I was very young, my dad told us stories. They were never from books, though. He would invent them, and they would never make any sense. For example, there would be two brothers traveling in Haiti on an adventure, and when he would start the story, the characters would be in the forest, then suddenly they would be on the top of a mountain, and then suddenly they would be on a boat. You never knew how they made it from one point to another, and he never explained it. But those stories were very entertaining, and I think that from a young age I truly understood that you don’t need the complete explanation for the story to work. In reality, so many things are unexplained. There are so many things that I don’t understand, so for me as a creator, it is very hard for me to create linear stories.

I would say that [this tendency] also comes from Haitian culture. Somebody will tell you a story from their daily life, but they will take so many detours along the way that sometimes you just want them to get to the point! But I realized that I’m exactly like that in my filmmaking. I go around and repeat many things. It’s not to find some kind of truth, but because the act of repeating is a very cathartic way to tell a story. I would say that is my main influence. And then there are Toni Morrison, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ousmane Sembène. I love Sembène’s films; they’re my favorite. When I was eighteen, I saw a retrospective of his films at La Cinémathèque Québécoise, and it changed my life.

Watching Cette maison, I felt like you wove together a web of portals that allow the audience to travel through time, across oceans, through ceremony, and through your family’s memories. Can you talk about how you layered the narrative components of the film?: Because it was my first feature, people tried to tell me that I needed to build it in specific steps, that I needed to do a scene-by-scene breakdown. I was like, “I’m not going to do that” [laughs]. I don’t think my brain works that way.

I was trying to translate how trauma affects memories, how trauma affects time. For me, going back and forth through time was a realistic [representation] of what trauma did to my mind and what it did to my family members. I think for a number of years we were stuck in time. Even as daily life continued, we were stuck both in the time that she died and in the past, where she was still alive. I tried to structure that chaotic feeling that happens in your mind when something like that happens to someone you love.

There is something beautiful in how you juxtapose and layer poetry and dialogue, and how this language passes from you to the audience and between the characters. There is a moment when Tessa repeats, “Anything is possible. Anything is possible, here.” That, to me, speaks to something about the poetic space that you created in the film.: That comes from my love of cinema and filmmaking. In film, anything is possible. You can bring people back to life. You can reconnect with your family. You can go back in time. For me, it’s a very inspiring space.

It was important for me that the character of Tessa keep repeating that, almost like a mantra, because even if she knows that she’s not alive and that she won’t be able to fully reconnect with her mother, family, or even her homeland—despite all that, in that moment, in the time of the film, it is possible.

Beautiful. And the scene set against the backdrop of the 1995 Quebec Referendum—in which provincial voters were asked to decide whether Quebec should declare independence from Canada—is another standout moment for me. Can you talk about why it was important for you to include that?: SODEC [Quebec’s provincial ministry of culture] was very generous, and they really helped us make the film. But it took three attempts to finance the project, and each time they would ask us why this scene was still here. “We don’t understand—suddenly we’re in 1995; what’s happening?”

It’s a very important moment in the film. I remember clearly that when my mother called to tell me that my cousin had died, I went back in time and tried to deconstruct everything to see where it had gone wrong, where I could have made a difference—and it was clear to me that it was the referendum. At the time, we had our bags packed, because we were supposed to go live with my cousin’s family in Connecticut. I thought that if we had gone to live with them, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.

There’s also the political implication. I live in Quebec, and all of the portrayals of the referendum have come from white Quebecers. Watching that scene, a lot of people were shocked at why the characters would be celebrating Canada [and the outcome of the vote, which resulted in Quebec remaining a Canadian province]. I think it opened a discussion, and I realized it wasn’t only my family [who felt as we did]. Some of my friends saw the film and said it was the same in their homes. A lot of people also left before the results were announced, not willing to take any chances. To put it in context, my parents were immigrants who fled due to political instability. To them, the [secession] of Quebec meant instability.

I love thinking about this film as a documentary. Can you talk a little about what inspires your experimentation with documentary form?: I’m glad you said that, because sometimes the film is classified as fiction and I think: no, it’s a documentary; I did the research. It is very interesting to deconstruct the way we see documentary; everything is [supposed to be] so formulaic, conventional. When I pitched the film as a documentary, it was difficult to get it funded because they would tell me this is not the way that you document reality. I was proposing that there could be a different way to comment on and experience reality. At one point, a producer suggested maybe I do a few interviews to [include] here and there, and I was like, “This is not going to work.” I don’t want to put in a recognizable element of the form just to make people feel secure. I wanted it to go in a totally different way, and I think it worked out well.

Anything Is Possible Here: A Conversation with Miryam Charles

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