Q&A with director Brigitte Poupart and protagonist Fabiola Pierre Monty – Friday, February 6 at 6:45 p.m. at Cinéma Beaubien. Tickets here.
To understand where she came from, Fabiola asked herself the question that became the guiding thread of this film: What would my life have been like if I had stayed in Haiti? Starting from her biological mother’s precarious economic situation, which left her with no choice but to entrust her daughter to another’s care, Fabiola imagines the many paths her life might have taken. She could have become a restavèk, grown up in a loving foster family, been abandoned to the streets, or adopted abroad. The film resonates with a universal theme that speaks to audiences of all generations: human dignity, the search for belonging, and the need for empathy at a time when migration and compassion are among the greatest challenges of our century. Fabiola arrived in Montreal on July 24, 2000, at the age of three and a half. Now, standing at the threshold of adulthood and her own becoming as a woman, I proposed that she return to Haiti to explore and film the land of her ancestors through her eyes and from her perspective. I invited her to hold the camera, to decide the framing, to retrace the journey I myself made twenty years earlier, when I went to look for her at a moment when Port-au-Prince was under the terrifying grip of the Chimères.
This documentary weaves together women’s stories—first Fabiola, then her sister Justine, and myself. It is a dialogue between the adoptive mother, the daughter, and the biological mother. More than anything, it is a journey of initiation through Fabiola’s gaze: her eyes, her vision, her perspective on her origins
