Shane Slater
Around the world, a fierce ideological war continues to rage between conservatism and more progressive viewpoints. Rarely has that tension been portrayed so boldly as it is in Gessica Généus‘ sophomore feature Marie Madeleine. In this Haiti-set drama, a brothel and a church are established in close proximity, igniting conflict and an unlikely connection between a sex worker and the pastor’s son. As the film’s writer-director-star Généus revealed in our Awards Radar interview, this microcosm of Haitian society points to broader concerns of freedom, power and lingering trauma.
Shane Slater: Congratulations on directing, writing and starring in this film. How did you go about developing this project?
Gessica Généus: It’s been around 15 years that I’ve been thinking about it. This type of subject has been done over and over, but I knew what I wanted to say. It took me time to understand how, you know? It took the last four years writing and then around one or two years looking for financing and the regular shenanigans. And then it was more a matter of finding money to go to Haiti and finding people that wanted to go to Haiti because that was a hassle also, because I mostly had money from from Europe and Canada.
Since the money was coming mostly outside of Haiti, I needed to have technicians from where the money was coming from, because that’s basically the deal. And it was a good thing in a way, because there were some technicians that we needed from outside of Haiti, because since we don’t have enough productions, there are some areas in the film crew where we don’t really have professionals that are that are good enough because they didn’t work enough.
SS: I love how the film explores the tension between Christians and more secular or African traditions, especially since most people only think about Vodou when they think about Haiti. How did you approach this conflict? You even placed the church right next to the brothel!
GG: In Haiti, especially in Port-au-Prince, you literally have a church on like, every corner, you know? Everywhere you go, in one street you can have five churches. And sometimes they have “sound fights” if I can put it like that. [Laughs]. But they would try to go higher with more volume to attract people. And it’s really hard to live around, and they’re everywhere. They’ve been there for a long time, especially Protestantism. They’ve been there for, I think, since the American occupation in 1915.
So when the Americans came, they mostly came with the idea to eradicate Vodou in Haiti. So they came with pastors and they were hunting Vodou priests to kill them. They killed a lot of them. So they established in Haiti, and it grew and grew. When you have a failed state, it’s kind of a default setting for other institutions to take the lead in a way. And the church have been doing this in Haiti. So since I was exposed to that daily confrontation, it made sense to me, having this desire to tackle this subject. To literally put it how I experience it, because they build churches whenever they want. They just need a few benches. So they can literally do it whenever they want, wherever they want, and you just wake up one day and there’s a church across the street or down the road.
SS: There is one scene in particular that I found quite clever in its political commentary, where the two sides are fighting and then they are distracted by a government handout. Could you touch on that? I found it to be so resonant.
GG: That scene for me, is one that makes me laugh a lot. It always comes down to that, you know? We pretend about our differences, but bottom line, you’re just starving. And even across the internet, there’s the saying, “You’re not depressed, you’re just broke.” [Laughs]. I don’t need therapy, I need money!
I think on a certain level, it’s the same thing that is happening. We’re pretending that we are fighting morality, giving so much space to how we judge others, how we judge ourselves. It’s mostly because we do have so much time on our hands, and we are scared and we are broken. We are lost, and then we lean on those very weak ways to give sense and meaning to our life. And it’s proven, in countries where the government is taking care of their people, that religion has way less power. There’s a reason for that.
So I love that scene, because ultimately it’s down to that. And you have the government that doesn’t have to do anything, because we’re busy fighting for nonsense, you know? We’re always losing the real purpose, or the real reason why we should be fighting for real. There are reasons to fight in this country.
So I’ve seen this scene. There was a demonstration against the government and at some point, they came with a big truck not far from where we were demonstrating. And they just went together, fighting to get a bag of rice. It’s heartbreaking but it also makes sense, as hard as it is to witness it. Bottom line, we’re “animals.” We have primal needs and it takes a lot of strength and courage to rise above that.
SS: I love how Marie is so self-assured and empowered, which subverts the idea of the exploited sex worker. Could you speak to how you fleshed out this character as the writer and actor?
GG: It’s very strange how we create things and give people names and we just pack the definition with it, without further question. We can literally put everybody in this one bag. And I worked a lot with women that made that choice, and I never came across regret. The more regret I heard about is about how they’re being treated by the clients. I’ve never heard people complaining that they don’t want to do that job. And I think the ones that complained, they complain like us, you know? Like people doing a job that they’re not necessarily enjoying every day. But it’s never about the job, it’s more about how they’re being treated for doing that job.
So I was not interested in going that way, because it’s not true. That’s not what I’ve experienced. I experienced women that are completely in their power. And it’s something that I’ve experienced, on a completely different level, as a female director. And it’s not even necessarily with my colleagues. It’s more like men that I’m meeting. They’re intimidated for no reason, they’re uncomfortable. And they become violent.
And I think that’s what I’m interested in. The reason they’re being so violent with women that made those choices. It’s because there’s power in choosing something that goes against society. So, of course, when someone sees you doing this, they literally know that you are different, in whatever way you’re different. You are different because if you can stand your ground and say this is what I’m going to do, even though you know what you’re going to go through. There’s power in that. And most of the time, the desire is to break that power. To show you there’s no power, you’re just garbage, you don’t need to be respected, to be loved.
And I realized that, without having to be a sex worker, I still experience it. You see what I mean? People see that you are going for it, you say you want to make film in a country where there’s no cinema. And you keep going. I made two films in Haiti and sometimes they go to Dominican Republic to make the films. When you make the film in Haiti, then it’s like you’re challenging a perception, and people can be triggered by it.
SS: On the other hand, Joseph is finding himself throughout the course of the film. And I get the sense that the actor’s performance felt more natural as the character found a sense of freedom. Could you speak to his background and your casting of that actor?
GG: I was looking for Marie Madeleine and Joseph for a long time. And I met him, and he has been a friend for 15 years. His sister is a very close friend of mine. I know him, but I’ve known him as a slam poet. He does poetry and he’s really extremely good at it. He’s a writer, a professor in Paris. So he’s this kind of intellectual guy on some level, but also very chaotic in his personal life. He has also a very seductive way to approach women, to approach people.
So, before I decided to go with him, first of all, he had dreadlocks. And my first question was, “Are you willing to remove them?” I really didn’t want to do this, but there’s no way a pastor’s son can have dreadlocks. And then we started to have a conversation, and we spent a month working on this thing, mostly talking.
But one day he came with the script, and he had a bunch of notes in the script, and I said to him, “Well, what are you doing with those notes?” And he’s like, “Yo, I plan on doing this and that”. And I said, “You gotta understand something. With this particular film, it’s like you’re gonna stand on top of a 200 story building and you’re just gonna have to jump. You have to go to that level of vulnerability.” The good thing is that, I think he reached a level of trust with me, because I spent a lot of time with my actors. I really love acting. It’s really the first love for me.
I spent a lot of time with them. For me, if there’s no trust, it’s not possible. I cannot work and just expect you to just do the job, you know? There’s a level of personal commitment that needs to happen from my side and from their side. There’s something that needs to be built together, for us to go where we want to go. I put a lot of energy in that process, because I know for sure when we get on set, all those things will be extremely beneficial.
SS: There are two particular scenes of violence that really affected me. There’s not much violence in the film but when it happens it’s very abrupt and jarring. How did you approach depicting violence in this film?
GG: I remember when I chose the courtroom scene. I was in residence, writing. And I was talking to a friend of mine, also a film major, and I was talking about lynching. How it’s something that they do to a point where it’s not that shocking to me. And I saw her turning red in front of me. And I said, “Yeah, we give ourselves justice.” If we can’t find it, we have this tradition of doing it ourselves.
And then she said this should be in the film. And I said, “No, there’s no need for that.” We kept talking for another two hours, and what strikes me is that as I was talking to her, I realized that this scene literally described how I see Jacques. In the sense that the whole country could burn. He’s so focused on what he thinks is his mission, what he thinks is his God-given mission. And the whole country could burn and he couldn’t care less about that. He wants to bring down that brothel, bring down those women. And there’s nothing that could show this perception more than that. To have someone burning literally behind you, and you could walk away, being so angry and so focused.
And it translates perfectly how I felt so many times in Haiti. Are we really fighting about that? We are crumbling, we are dying every day. There is so much horror in our country, and and we would fight over this person that didn’t wear the right dress on the red carpet. It doesn’t make sense.
I needed to see it. Even now, talking to you about it, I’m like, Jesus, it doesn’t make any sense. And I know they’re going to be mad. They’re going to be extremely mad, because they’re very prude. They get mad when they get exposed like that. I don’t think I was even trying to judge. I think I really wanted to see this. The way we make complete abstractions of our problems, just to get distracted by whatever random thing gets our attention. Maybe it’s a survival thing. We are so triggered and constantly aggressed by so many things in one minute, one second, one hour.
So much is happening. I remember we were celebrating my friend’s birthday. We had a DJ, because we do that also, we carve a moment of happiness, no matter what. We say if we keep waiting for this country to allow us to celebrate, we’ll never do so. So we do carve moments. So we were celebrating, and at some point we heard noise outside and saw a bunch of people carrying things from their neighborhood.
It’s always this dynamic of so many different things existing at the same time. It’s something that my film is deeply rooted in. How all those perceptions are trying to coexist.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
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