Film Festival - Screening of "Mountains" + Q&A with filmmaker Monica Sorelle, actors, and producer

Monica Sorelle

Filmmaker

Monica Sorelle is a Haitian-American filmmaker and artist born & based in Miami. Her work explores alienation and displacement, and preserves cultural traditions within Miami & the Caribbean with a focus on the African & Latin diasporas that reside there. 



Monica’s feature directorial debut, Mountains, had its world premiere at Tribeca Festival, where it was awarded a Special Jury Mention in the U.S. Narrative Feature competition. Mountains later had its international premiere at TIFF, received awards from Miami Film Festival,  BlackStar, and Indie Memphis, and screened at festivals around the world, including Glasgow Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, and AFI Fest. Mountains was nominated for two Film Independent Spirit Awards, with Monica receiving the Someone to Watch Award.



As a creative producer, Monica’s short films have won top prizes at Berlinale, BlackStar, and Miami Film Festival, been selected at Sundance, New Orleans Film Festival, and New Directors/New Films, and acquired by Criterion Channel and Indiana University Black Film Center & Archive.



Her photo and video work has been shown in group exhibitions at various institutions including Oolite Arts, Art and Culture Center/Hollywood, Augusta Savage Gallery, and on PAMM TV, and supported by Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Caribbean Cultural Institute Artist Fellowship, Locust Project’s Wavemaker Grant, and Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. Monica has received a Princess Grace Award, the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, and an Ellies Creator Award. She is a current studio resident at Bakehouse Art Complex. 

Robert Colom-Vargas

Producer

Robert Colom-Vargas (he/him) is a writer-producer, film curator, and social artist from Miami. Across the mediums of creative producing, screenwriting, film curation, and community activation, his practice evaluates understandings of identity through the influences of place, desire, and relationality. Creating and supporting characters and images that place themselves in direct opposition to hereditary systems of belief, Colom’s work seeks to deliberately reveal and disrupt unconscious bias, and petition for new folklore. Through investigations of spatial and narrative belonging, he explores the cultural synapses between the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean as they materialize across the diasporic space and inform the cultural inheritance of America’s immigrant populations.

Robert’s latest film as co-writer and producer, Mountains, explores gentrification in Little Haiti, intergenerational divides between immigrants and their American children, and many of Miami’s complicated dynamics, told from the point of view of a Haitian family experiencing the neighborhood’s rapid changes. Directed by and co-written with Monica Sorelle, Mountains was awarded a Special Jury Prize at its 2023 Tribeca Festival debut, premiered internationally at TIFF, and was nominated for two Film Independent Spirit Awards in 2024.

Robert was a 2023 Film Independent Producing Lab Fellow, a 2020 Southern Producers Lab Fellow, and three-time nominee to The Gotham Project Market. In 2023, Robert was selected by Third Horizon to workshop his narrative projects at EFM Fiction Toolbox–Berlinale.

Robert is the founding director of Cinemóvil, a free mobile repertory cinema touring Miami neighborhoods with a program of classic and contemporary films from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Robert’s narrative work has won top prizes at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, Berlinale, BlackStar, IndieMemphis, and Miami Film Festival, and has been distributed by MUBI, HBO, PBS, and Criterion Channel. He is currently developing several projects as an artist in residence at Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami, FL.