I watch so many films these days that it’s hard to feel excited any title in particular. One reliable way to still feel a frisson of thrill is watching something from a country or culture I have zero familiarity with. Haiti is one place I’d never expected to even have a cinema industry given its lawlessness, yet it has produced an impressive film in Freda. The plot of a young woman trying to survive in a country with no hope is composed of the usual tropes. But it more than makes up for it by conveying an authentic sense of what everyday life in Haiti must be like.

Freda is a young woman who is doing her best to get by in Port-au-Prince. Her mother Jeannette runs a sundry shop out of the tiny house that they also share with her elder sister Esther and brother Moïse. Freda is studying anthropology at university but Jeannette dismisses her education as useless and persuades her to join her cousin Géraldine to work in a French-owned restaurant. By contrast she gives more freedom to Esther who lightens her skin with whitening products to look more beautiful. Expecting Esther to marry a rich husband, Jeannette turns a blind eye to her having an affair with a married pastor, then dating a musician and later a senator. Moïse seemingly does nothing at all and is taken care of by his sisters and his mother. Meanwhile Freda’s boyfriend Yeshua returns from the Dominican Republic where he has been undergoing treatment after being hit by a stray bullet. Seeing no hope in Haiti, he tries to persuade Freda to move with him to Santo Domingo.

This film was notable enough to be recognized at the Cannes Film Festival but it wasn’t a big success. None of the people involved including director Gessica Généus are well-known and the film itself was made in between the COVID-19 lockdowns while Haiti was in crisis. It’s quite an achievement to even get this made in the face of such obstacles and what’s more, it’s an excellent one by any standard. It has good photography, strong acting and arguably is partly a documentary. I presume that the shots of the protests and riots on the streets of the capital are real and not staged by the filmmakers. As far as I can tell, it’s a reasonably realistic depiction of ordinary life in the country. The narrow wooden shops reminded me of my time in the Solomon Islands. The family can be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly need to duck into cover when they hear gunshots. Yet even amidst the squalor there is wealth. The white people seemingly live in a world of their own with their mansions and fine restaurants. The police are nowhere to be seen when there is trouble but after Esther starts dating the politician, the family gets rides in clean white police SUV. To those of us who have never been to Haiti, this is a much more nuanced portrait than what we get through the news headlines.

The stories of Freda, Esther and the rest of the family are familiar ones of desperation and poverty. They are told very well and that they are stories set in Haiti makes them fascinating. In one scene, we see Jeannette apologizing to the pastor about Freda’s name, coined before she embraced Christianity. Yet that doesn’t stop the girls from enjoying themselves at a Voodoo festival. Nor does Jeannette mind that Esther is having an affair with the married pastor. Freda wants to study and does her best to juggle between her job and the university. But then her professors go on strike because the principal has seemingly embezzled all the money. These details bring the day-to-day details of the crisis in Haiti to life for us. One issue however is that the film takes a scattershot approach in telling multiple anecdotes but rarely resolves them. At one point, we dip into Géraldine’s life. Jeannette cruelly mocks her for ever believing that a relationship with mulatto could ever work. It’s a very effective scene but it feels strange for the film to temporarily shift focus to her for that one subplot.

After it lays out the innumerable miseries of the Haitian people, the film struggles to arrive at a satisfactory ending. After all the crisis is ongoing and arguably even worsening. What it finally settles on, that Freda realizes that her mother too is lost and helpless in the face of all these problems, works well enough but a little sudden given the prior lack of character development. I consider this to already be an incredible achievement given the relative inexperience of the filmmakers and performers as well as the working conditions in the country. If anything, it’s under-rated and deserves to be more widely seen.