Mon­i­ca Sorelle: ​‘I’m work­ing through my grief about Mia­mi chang­ing so rapid­ly and violently’

For the peo­ple who live in South Flori­da, every­thing seems in flux. Every bit of land­scape, every build­ing we cher­ish, every per­son we walk by – they all seem to be dis­ap­pear­ing over the months and years. The gen­tri­fi­ca­tion of the city is all too real for those who live here and film­mak­ers like Mon­i­ca Sorelle, whose debut fea­ture Moun­tains is hav­ing its UK pre­mière as part of the BFI’s Black Debu­tantes series, are keen­ly aware of this fact.

Per­haps that con­scious­ness is pre­cise­ly what makes Moun­tains so com­pelling; it’s not just a por­trait of Miami’s Lit­tle Haiti neigh­bor­hood and the peo­ple that inhab­it it – focus­ing on a Hait­ian demo­li­tion work­er and his fam­i­ly nav­i­gat­ing the real­i­ties of rede­vel­op­ment – but active­ly in con­ver­sa­tion with the uncom­fort­able ways we can par­tic­i­pate in our own displacement.

The seed for this pic­ture was plant­ed when Sorelle moved back to Mia­mi after film school, com­ing home so that she could be around her cul­ture again. She grew up in North Mia­mi and her moth­er worked in Lit­tle Haiti, but she notes that she quick­ly ​“real­ized that Lit­tle Haiti was chang­ing in a very sub­tle way.” Sorelle cred­its the short film Right to Wyn­wood for ​“illu­mi­nat­ing what gen­tri­fi­ca­tion looks like and who the play­ers were, espe­cial­ly in South Flori­da, where the same devel­op­ers who bought up Wyn­wood prop­er­ty are now buy­ing up prop­er­ty in Lit­tle Haiti.”

Ear­ly on, she tried com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing and was quick­ly burnt out on it, but this remained with her, espe­cial­ly while work­ing for Third Hori­zon out of O Cin­e­ma (whose space in Wyn­wood was lat­er demol­ished), where she had the idea for what became Moun­tains. As Sorelle and her co-writer Robert Colom were walk­ing to lunch one day, she noticed ​“there were still a lot of hous­es in Wyn­wood, but they were all slat­ed for demo­li­tion. A demo­li­tion work­er try­ing on his shoes caught my eye, leav­ing his cowork­ers and just cross­ing over towards the still-res­i­den­tial side of the neighborhood.”

“The thought of ​‘what if he lived there’ crossed my mind,” she con­tin­ues. ​“What are the impli­ca­tions of being part of the gen­tri­fi­ca­tion of your own neigh­bor­hood?” This train of thought led them to apply for (and sub­se­quent­ly win) Oolite Arts’ Cin­e­mat­ic Arts Res­i­den­cy, where the microbud­get fea­ture would take form. ​“I think we believed that we could sound an alarm. It’s bleak out here, and I don’t know if this microbud­get film is going to be the cat­a­lyst for any­thing, but I think we changed our out­look to being archival instead of pre­ven­ta­tive. We were able to doc­u­ment a space in time before it changed drastically.”

Though the film is only mak­ing its Lon­don pre­mière now, Mon­i­ca has had time to reflect on her film since it pre­miered in 2023, as well as the way the place she cap­tured on film has con­tin­ued to change. ​“I’m real­ly work­ing through my grief about Mia­mi chang­ing so rapid­ly and vio­lent­ly, know­ing how these devel­op­ers are play­ing monop­oly with our homes, our neigh­bor­hoods, and our cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, and not feel­ing like there’s a way to tru­ly stop it.”

And that sen­sa­tion of impend­ing doom amidst the quo­tid­i­an goings-on of life in South Flori­da is pre­cise­ly what one can feel through­out Moun­tains. ​“I could have approached this in so many ways and, for some peo­ple, it would have been much more melo­dra­mat­ic if the char­ac­ters were fight­ing a devel­op­er with a cig­ar and a map say­ing ​‘I’m going to take over this town’,” Sorelle says with a laugh, ​“But I’m more inter­est­ed in tak­ing gen­tri­fi­ca­tion from this polit­i­cal con­cept and explor­ing what it looks like on the ground floor for this family.”

The pol­i­tics of the film are impos­si­ble to ignore though, espe­cial­ly as those in pow­er in the Unit­ed States per­pet­u­ate fal­si­ties about Hait­ian immi­grants and strip them of rights. Mon­i­ca is, right­ful­ly, baf­fled that she has to have this kind of con­ver­sa­tion: ​“It feels so stu­pid to have to do this, but I also thought a lot about demys­ti­fy­ing Hait­ian cul­ture for a lot of peo­ple. Even though we have such large pop­u­la­tions in major met­ro­pol­i­tan cities, I feel like we’re under­rep­re­sent­ed and a lot of what you hear about us is geopo­lit­i­cal tragedies and news from the island. In a way, I just want­ed to talk about the cul­ture I grew up in and the fam­i­ly mem­bers I know, just hon­or­ing them in a way that I don’t think they’ve been hon­ored in cin­e­ma before.”

Films like Fer­nan­do Frías de la Parra’s Ya no estoy aquí and Ira Sachs’ Lit­tle Men were influ­en­tial to the approach Sorelle took with Moun­tains – the for­mer in how to find ​“relata­bil­i­ty in speci­fici­ty” in its depic­tion of Mon­ter­rey and the lat­ter in its ​“qui­et beau­ty in approach­ing gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, pow­er, and eco­nom­ic sta­tus” – but Ital­ian neo­re­al­ism also direct­ly influ­enced its cre­ation. ​“We’re watch­ing, in real time, an entire city and neigh­bor­hood being changed before our eyes, so hav­ing a most­ly real­ist approach was the best way to show how cap­i­tal­ism real­ly sucks the mag­ic out of everything.”

“Haitians and oth­er Caribbean folks are so mag­i­cal. There’s a mys­ti­cal­i­ty to our expe­ri­ences and our spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, but I want­ed to ground the film in real­ism to imag­ine that the only thing that exist­ed for our lead, Xavier, was the pur­suit of mate­r­i­al suc­cess. We only lean into mag­i­cal real­ism near the end to ush­er him out of that mind­set,” she explains. That real­ism even ties into the way that lan­guage is approached in the film, with char­ac­ters and actors actu­al­ly speak­ing Cre­ole like the Hait­ian immi­grants in our fair city actu­al­ly do. It’s some­thing that Sorelle is con­scious she could not have man­aged with a big­ger movie, but the lim­i­ta­tions of the microbud­get fea­ture did not stop her from mak­ing the film she want­ed to make.

“I was moti­vat­ed by the per­son­al ethos of the film and the small crew,” Mon­i­ca says, not­ing that the com­mu­ni­ty she built with this film is a grand part of what made the expe­ri­ence worth­while. ​“Pro­duc­tion was real­ly mobile in case of any­thing, like if a neigh­bor passed by that we could inter­view. We kept our foot­print small in the com­mu­ni­ty, but there were things that hap­pened that made shoot­ing hard. We’d be on a demo­li­tion site and thought they were on break and in the mid­dle of the dia­logue, the work start­ed up again and we’re hav­ing to scream at each oth­er through the scene.”

“We had to roll with those punch­es, but every­one showed up. Every­one who’s there, on screen or off, put their all into it because they believed in the sto­ry, and that’s indica­tive of the kind of com­mu­ni­ty film­mak­ing that I hope to con­tin­ue being a part of, even as I scale up. Maybe a smarter film­mak­er would make some­thing that can be shot in Belarus or some­thing, but I’ve built a com­mu­ni­ty in Mia­mi and I’m in love with them and want to con­tin­ue mak­ing films about us.”

For now, she’s con­tin­u­ing to prep and cre­ate new work and, as she jokes, Mon­i­ca is ​“pret­ty gagged” about her place in BFI’s Black Debu­tantes series, which she is thank­ful to Rógan Gra­ham for putting togeth­er and plac­ing these works in front of audi­ences in the UK. ​“I’m show­ing with so many heroes and elders that I look up to, like the fact that my name is any­where near Cauleen Smith is amaz­ing. Even with the con­straints that these women had on their bud­gets, on their films, on their cre­ativ­i­ty, they were some­how still able to make ground­break­ing work. I’m so proud to be stand­ing arm-in-arm with these bril­liant women.”

Moun­tains plays at the BFI on May 29 2025 as part of the Black Debu­tants season.