Petit Frère

A Martian rover explores the streets of Santiago de Chile. A dog, born in Haiti and called “Courage”, works detecting bombs at La Moneda, the governmental palace. Meanwhile, Petit-Frère Wilner, a Haitian immigrant, is being interviewed in a makeshift television studio, whose host is also the cameraman. To speak of exile and identity—in this case, that of the Haitian community in Chile—Roberto Collio and Rodrigo Robledo choose a fragmented form, full of surprises and u-turns, a fragmentary approach that proceeds via displacement and free association. Guided by a creole voiceover—the language that Petit-Frère uses for the news bulletin he publishes for his community—we thus enter into a dialogue, between the collective and the personal, between the dreams and the reality of these first-generation immigrants, between visions of the future and ghosts of the past. So, as Petit-Frère lets his imagination take him to Mars, a painter-poet secluded in a setting of ruins becomes a visionary, the conscience of a people escaped from slavery and heading towards an uncertain future.

Céline Guénot

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