Picking up gossip along the way, Esperance walks around the neighborhood exchanging pleasantries with people who have for long been fixtures in her life, just as she has been one in theirs. But for as much Sorelle and cinematographer Javier Labrador Deulofeu revel in immortalizing the colorful, lived-in streets of this community, she also engages with the nagging feeling of impermanence all immigrants share, being in another country while thinking about the one left behind. For Xavier, the bridge between him and Haiti is a radio program on news from his embattled Caribbean homeland. The body language and stoic demeanor of Nazaire (an actor who’s previously had small roles in TV and film) transmit an imposing fortitude, and at times inflexibility, while still allowing for gentleness.
Sorelle’s “Mountains” joins other recent American productions such as “On the Seventh Day,” about Mexican immigrants from the state of Puebla in New York, or “Menashe,” following a Hasidic Jewish father, that document ethnic enclaves existing parallel to the country’s mainstream society where life often unfolds in a language other than English. These universes full of stories refuse to be homogenized into an indistinct mass, straddling a degree of inevitable assimilation with a resilient conviction to maintain their identity.
Soon, corporate vultures, eager to buy homes for cheap, begin to circle the family, banking, likely, on how unwelcoming the new developments will make the area for the immigrant population. What’s more insidious is that they tacitly force those who live there to partake in their own displacement: when Xavier and Esperance attend the open house for the residence they dream of owing, the person assisting the agent whispers to them in Creole—she is also of Haitian descent—not as a reassuring gesture, but with an undertone of condescension that Esperance doesn’t appreciate. Slowly, their acquittances will be replaced with people new to the neighborhood who act is if it has always belonged to them. That’s how gentrification operates, turning spaces that once held significance for the marginalized into bland playgrounds for outsiders who can afford them. It’s a mentality of ruthless appropriation with no interest in fostering community. The strength of Sorelle’s storytelling hinges on how she divulges these points not in verbose dialogue or forced confrontations, but through the ambivalent emotions that coat all human drama.
There, among the ruins of a vibrant community under siege, Xavier stands tall taking claim to the place where he’s built a life, humble and hard-fought but his and his family’s. To leave would mean to migrate again, to be uprooted and stripped from any semblance of home, all for the benefit of neo-colonizers whose economic prowess inflicts pain guised as opportunity. Xavier’s mere presence means resistance, as do the boisterous sounds of his people’s festivities and of their language. And though the bulldozers may rip windows and walls apart, it’s the intangible that’s unmovable. They, indeed, can’t move mountains.
