Lakay: A Celebration Of Haitian Cinema

For Haitians around the world, home is not a fixed place.

Some know Haiti intimately—navigating the highs and lows of a country steeped in mysticism but burdened by immense hardship. Others know Haiti only from afar, gathering fragments of family stories, language, photos, and food to piece together a sense of belonging. As first- and second-generation immigrants navigate the complex ties that bind us to our roots, the throughline remains a singular desire: to truly see ourselves reflected.

At a moment when travel to Haiti is increasingly constrained, and Haitian films remain under-circulated in the United States, Lakay positions cinema as a form of access. The series brings together four films that trace the many ways home is remembered, inherited, displaced, and made anew across the Haitian diaspora.

Directed by Miryam Charles and Gessica Généus, respectively, Song for the New World and Freda function as vital meditations on what it means to remain in Haiti amid political instability and uncertainty. Both filmmakers turn their attention toward the lives of Haitian women—centering desire, grief, and survival against the visceral backdrop of the land. By rejecting an external gaze that often treats Haiti as a spectacle, Généus and Charles focus on the quotidian, showcasing that some of the most profound political truths are found in the quiet fortitude of young women.

As the series shifts toward the diaspora, Monica Sorelle’s Mountains and Al’IkensPlancher’s Konpa examine what happens when home becomes something carried with us and passed down to the next generation. In Mountains, the fight to preserve Little Haiti becomes inseparable from the struggle of first-generation immigrants attempting to maintain identity and stability in the face of displacement and erasure. Konpa approaches cultural inheritance from a more intimate perspective, tracing how Haiti survives through music, movement, language, and interpersonal connection among younger generations raised at a distance from the land itself.

What Lakay ultimately asks is: how do you define home? The films in this series insist on the nuances of Haitian life—its tenderness, contradictions, and tenacity. Together, they challenge viewers to consider how home is shaped not only by geography, but by memory, ritual, community, and the stories we take with us. In doing so, cinema becomes both reclamation and portal: a way of seeing Haiti, and ourselves.

Lakay: A Celebration of Haitian Cinema is curated by Abigail Cherubin and Christy Joseph.

Words by Abigail Cherubin and Christy Joseph