Critic Reviews

Sorelle has said that she created “Mountains” as a movie where “between plots lie moments.” How refreshing. Especially since those moments really feel like they exist, more than just “being captured.”

Mountains is a film smart enough to forgo simplistic melodrama or narrative neatness. It’s the kind that dares us to look back and consider what it means to create a home away from the shores where you were born, in a country hostile not just to your betterment but to your very survival.

In this nuanced and often joyful film, the only violence involves the recurrent crash of bulldozers through stucco and timber walls as the neighbourhood transforms and some dreams get crushed as well.

Partly a tribute to the routine occurrences that collectively make a place feel like one belongs, Monica Sorelle’s delicately galvanizing slice-of-life debut “Mountains,” set in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, overflows with such details.

A house is just a structure; what’s inside makes it a home. This film delicately shows what happens when the powers that be decide that the home you made is no longer yours.

It’s rare to see a film that captures a disappearing community with such immediacy, remorse, and, yes, occasional joy.

Sorelle may not offer much hope in terms of how one can fight against these systems that preach continual change, but her film is still a striking if slightly overstuffed, debut from a filmmaker to watch.

Mountains is the kind of movie that reminds us why we love to sit in the dark and peek at other people’s lives. It’s a three-way character study that teaches us about life, parenthood, marriage, and expectations without ever feeling preachy, boring, or flimsy.

Even when Mountains’ narrative, which often feels more like a series of beautifully conjured vignettes, doesn’t hit its full potential, the way Sorelle thinks of gentrification rewards our close attention.

Mountains interprets leisure not so much as the opposite of work or struggle, but a stance that can and should suffuse each moment of life, not discounting those we sell to make a living.