Returning to the Gene Siskel Film Center Aug. 30 to Sept. 5, the new movie “Mountains” played last year’s edition of the Black Harvest Film Festival at the Film Center. Now, Chicago-based Music Box Films picked it up for distribution and it’s getting the circulation it deserves. I hope it gets the audiences, too; it’s really good. Set in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, it’s one of those films that makes you walk around your own city, your own neighborhood, or someone else’s, with more perceptive eyes.
Without polemics, this assured debut feature from co-writer and director Monica Sorelle shows us what happens when we demolish established neighborhoods with deep historical roots in order to make way for wealthier, statistically whiter gentrification. That sentence puts it bluntly. “Mountains” does not. It works through its characters, not positions or opinions, and in a tight, efficiently used 95 minutes, Sorelle makes us care.
A steadily working housing demolition crew member, Haitian immigrant Xavier (Atibon Nazaire, rock-solid) is an imposing but gentle-spirited man, and the tear-down business is booming. He knows he hit the jackpot marrying the serene, ever-watchful Esperance (Sheila Anozier, an excellent actor as well as a choreographer and visual artist). Life’s comfortable in their small, vibrantly decked-out house in Little Haiti, a neighborhood reminding them of home, but lately a lot less so, given what’s being built all around them.
Esperance does a little of everything: serving as a crossing guard at the local elementary school, a shift at the laundromat and her own business as a dressmaker. The couple’s grown son, Junior (Chris Renois), lives with them, too; he has dropped out of college and he’s finding his way as a stand-up comedian while trying to steer clear of serious trouble. Xavier loves his son, but doesn’t love what he sees: It looks rootless, a little lost, compared to his own early responsibilities when he was in his early 20s, married with a kid.
Sorelle and co-writer Robert Colom establish a few key points of conflict. Xavier works for a racist crew supervisor looking out for his nephew’s well-being more than his other workers. Xavier has dreams of buying a bigger home in a fast-gentrifying part of Miami; Esperance favors staying where they are. “Mountains” proceeds with an equally concerned interest for husband, wife and son, veering down paths devoted to one, then another and another. Through its series of everyday events — a brother-in-law’s visit; a friend’s daughter’s birthday party; a culminating father/son discussion without much precedent for either Xavier or Junior — “Mountains” lets these people tell their stories without a lot of contrivance and hardly a speck of inauthenticity.
That father/son scene, dealing with Xavier’s long-hidden feelings about his own early years, comes a little bit out of nowhere, and the pacing feels a bit rushed near the end. But director Sorelle, who grew up in Miami and met co-writer Colom as part of the production crew of Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight,” has a careful, often witty eye for compositions and side characters. I love the neighbor walking while talking, out of frame, then in, then out again, on his cellphone every time Xavier pulls up to his house after work.
The commercial film industry in America has never been in crazier, more perilous shape. Yet new filmmakers keep telling their stories of family, community and country. Some are truer than others, or more strikingly realized visually, or a bit on the earnest side. “Mountains” does what it sets out to do with grace, and a sure instinct for music, color, faces and moments of decision regarding where we’ve come. And where we go from here, amid the latest tear-downs and, suddenly, another slew of three-story townhomes.
“Mountains” — 3 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (some smoking)
Running time: 1:35
How to watch: Aug. 30-Sept. 5, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org/mountains. In English, Creole and Spanish with some English subtitles.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.