“Marie Madeleine”, an interview with director and actress Géssica Généus

Five years after presenting her debut feature, “Freda” (a title executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola which was the second Haitian film ever to be submitted for the Oscars), in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, Haitian director Géssica Généus is back on the Croisette, this time in Cannes Premiere sidebar, with her second film, “Marie Madeleine”, where she herself plays the eponymous character – “for convenience”, says Géssica Généus, as she couldn’t have asked of another actress what she undertook to do herself.

Director Géssica Généus on moving from a realistic film, anchored in a context of political unrest, to a more radiant story about the pure relationship uniting Marie Madeleine and Joseph (Béonard Monteau), with oneiric visuals, and a space for beauty and for different art forms: “I wanted to float, because I’ve been feeling weighed down by everything that’s happening in my country, by traumas that we’ve carried for our whole lives, and I wanted to feel a little bit more power in that fragility, if I can express it that way, and I wanted this film to be exactly how I see my country. In Haiti, everything lives together – the beauty, the complexity of our society, etc. It’s all there, all at once, not one thing after the other, so I wanted to make a film that shows everything at the same time. My DoP and I worked for a year before we got to the production phase of the filmand we knew we wanted each frame to be like a painting, because we are painters. we are artists, we are so full of talent, and I wanted this to be seen so bad, so I put a lot of work and energy into crafting these visuals, this way of existing, into this film.”

On managing to represent, in her script, many different facets of Haiti

“It’s heavy to balance, because everything is happening for real, in real time… When you are used to a society where things are kind of in order, it’s hard to imagine that all of those things can happen, and that they do at the same time. You think wow, no one would be able to absorb all this and still stay alive, but we do! We absorb everything that is happening to us on a daily basis, and we still go through it, and this needs to happen, because we don’t function the same way as a nation… Just because you want to make something lighter doesn’t mean you can lie about the fact that we have all this in our world, constantly, so I wanted the film to be the same: I wanted it to be intense, as intense as the way we go through life on a daily basis.”

On the idea of pitting a brothel and a church against each other by placing them on opposite sides of the same street

“I thought well, let’s just be upfront and put this church right there… because in Haiti, every step you take, you have a church, like every two or three meters. It’s everywhere! Because of the fact that the State is completely collapsing, or has collapsed already, religion has taken up so much space, comforting the people by saying ‘okay, we’re gonna save you, don’t worry. The State is not taking care of you but we’re gonna take care of you.’ But this begs the question of how they are positioning themselves, saying that they are apolitical when they are influencing the people’s perception and everything that’s happening in the country, so yes, I really wanted to talk about morality and about what happens when a society is not led by a government, but by faith in something that is completely detached from the concrete reality that we are dealing with on a daily basis.”

On the violence of religion as shown in the film

“I keep wondering, ‘Where is the love in all this?’, because when you think about it, the First Commandment is to love, it talks about love a lot, but… is there any love left in our interpretation of religion, of the Bible? Where is the love and why is it so far in the back? Why is it only for a specific group of people? (…) I feel like there’s a failure in the church’s mission. They don’t live up to what they promised, and I am extremely mad at that.”

Plot