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Logline

On the one year anniversary of her mother’s death, a Haitian-American dancer claims her place in a long line of powerful women.

Synopsis

We meet Vicky on the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death. A first-generation Haitian-American dancer, Vicky returns to her family home for a memorial gathering. While she is there, Vicky sticks out like a sore thumb and is deeply uncomfortable with the Vodou rituals that her family partakes in to mark the anniversary.

With the encouragement of her loving Tatie Edwidge, her mother’s baby sister, Vicky ends up spending a day at her mother’s home by herself. Her dreams are visited by her mother, her childhood self and the loa that her family is committed to serving, Èzili Dantò. At the end of this weekend back home, Vicky, now Victorine is fully changed and finally ready to embrace her cultural and spiritual inheritance.

This film is at once both subjective in its exploration of a young woman’s interiority and objective in its narration of Haitian diasporic life, the debts we owe to those who’ve forged our identities, and the costs incurred when we ignore those debts.

Victorine exists as an intimate and visceral portrait of Haitian diasporic life that understands (Black) movement as a sacred ritual of connection, allowing us to reach through space and time.

Victorine is about the forming of new cultures by adapting and blending different sides of yourself. We want to showcase this duality, the loneliness of it, and the richness of that fusion when it’s achieved.
 

Meet the Filmmakers

Lunise Cerin – Writer/Director
Lunise Cerin is a queer, Haitian filmmaker, born in Philadelphia and raised between both Port-au-Prince, Haiti and the US. She loves to tell stories of black people’s pursuit of self, expression, liberation and love. After receiving her BS in sociology, with a minor in photography from Saint Joseph’s University, Cerin married her love of people and images by pivoting to film.

In 2012 Cerin moved to Los Angeles where she began her career as a content producer at the SVOD platform Black&Sexy TV. There she worked as a series writer, producer, director and self-taught editor for 6 years. Cerin’s second short film 25 Frames which she wrote, directed and edited recently premiered at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and also screened at festivals in the UK. She is currently working as Editor and Story producer for her second feature documentary film, The Fight for Haiti. Cerin is an MFA candidate in Columbia University’s Screenwriting MFA program, where she was admitted with the Bridges Larson Foundation Fellowship.

Danielle Dougé – Producer
Danielle Dougé is a Haitian American filmmaker from Chicago, IL. Her work most often centers an exploration of Black womanhood/feminisms, queerness, ancestral knowledge and intergenerational trauma via the genres of magical realism, thriller, and drama. Dougé’s recent work includes the experimental video Dissemblance (2018), the video essay And Then There Was Hair (2018), the narrative shorts She Came Back (2020) and Summertime Pie (2023). Dougé’s producing work includes the short films: Everything’s Fine (Sorem-Smikle, 2019), Pair (Goodrich, 2023), 25 Frames (Cerin, 2022), and Triangle of Perfection (Dimambro, 2023). She holds a BA in Radio/TV/Film from Northwestern University and an MFA in Film with a concentration in screenwriting from Columbia University’s School of the Art’s Film Program. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at Barnard College and a teaching artist at Developing Artists.

Donovan Tolledo – Co-Producer
Donovan Tolledo is a writer/producer born in Saudi Arabia and raised in the Philippines and Chicago. He received his MFA from Columbia University in Creative Producing in May 2022, where he received the Arthur Krim Memorial Award and Michael Hausman Foundation Award for producing. Fat Lip, his short thesis film which he wrote and produced, received Jury Selects and Audience Award at CUFF, a National Board of Review nomination, and the Panavision New Filmmakers Program grant. It premiered at Outfest Fusion 2023. The feature film script of the same name landed him the 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Fellowship. Donovan is also a 2023 Film Independent Project Involve Producing Fellow.

Love Soulèy – Co-Producer
Love Soulèy is a Haitian American producer, director, and visual archivist born in Miami, FL. With a holistic approach, her work focuses on preserving Melanated & Indigenous cultures and folk traditions through film and photography. She was in the first cohort of the Eddie Bauer film program where she directed and produced her film Fanm Nan Mòn: Womyn of the Mountainous Land. She most recently produced A Future Perfect which is showing at festivals in America & Europe. Her work explores the themes of ancestral knowledge, culture, feminine energy, communal healing, returning to the earth, and remembrance.

Cameron Carr – Co-Producer
Cameron Carr is born and bred Harlemite, Filmmaker and Creative Producer. As a pragmatic optimist, and ambition to become the Issa Rae/Jordan Peele/Donald Glover ultimate hybrid: in hand with producing commercials at his Creative agency Wieden+Kennedy NY by day- Cameron’s constant mission is to continue to push, propel and create Black-led stories through film and creative, while spotlighting systemic inequities that often remain unconscious and unspoken in society.

Cameron’s short film The Inventor (2022) won Best Historic Short at the 2022 Manhattan Film Festival and has made a festival run at 12 festivals thus far, including CIFF as 2022 Programmer’s pick selection, Oscar Micheaux Film Festival, and nominated as WarnerMedia HBOMax Best of the Best Short within the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival.

Cameron is coming off of Assistant Directing and Producing his first Feature film and Sundance Grant recipient, Wild Darlings Sing the Blues (2024) and Executive Producing and Assistant Directing Speak Up Brotha! (2023), which had its global premiere at the Oscar-qualifying Cleveland International Film Festival. As of late, Cameron made his directorial debut for film Harlem Fragments (2023) in March, after being selected as the Ida B. Wells Disrupting the Narrative Grant recipient.

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Contact

For inquiries, please contact fiscalsponsorship@filmindependent.org.