Gessica Généus wins Best Film Prize in Rome for ‘Marie Madeleine’

A story set on the streets of Jacmel took the top prize Saturday evening on the stage of Rome’s Villa Medici, where Haitian director Gessica Généus won the Villa Medici Prize for Best Film for “Marie Madeleine.”

The award came at the festival’s sixth edition, which ran Sept. 16-20. The jury.

“Marie Madeleine” is Généus’ second fiction feature. She wrote and directed it and stars in it as a sex worker in Jacmel who insists on her freedom. Her life is upended when she meets Joseph, a young evangelical bound by the rules of his religious community. Their encounter, the film suggests, unsettles the certainties of both. It is not a retelling of the biblical figure’s life but a fiction rooted in Haitian society, weighing desire, faith, individual liberty and social exclusion.

In an interview with the Cannes Film Festival in May, Généus said she wanted to examine the moral judgments, and the neat divisions between good and evil, that shape some relationships in Haiti. According to Chokarella noted that the film was made with actors and technicians tied to the country, at a time when Haiti’s cultural sector faces heavy economic, logistical and security constraints.

The Rome prize is the latest stop on a busy international run. The film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, in the Cannes Première section. In June it won the Grand Prix du Jury at France’s Cabourg Film Festival, sharing the honor with Shahrbanoo Sadat’s “No Good Men.” This month it is a Centrepiece selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, with screenings Sept. 15, 16 and 20.

For Généus, it is also a return. Her first feature, “Freda,” played at Cannes in 2021 in the Un Certain Regard section, and looked outward at young people and the social and political fractures of Port-au-Prince. “Marie Madeleine” turns inward, toward intimacy, belief and the pull between people.

Généus has kept her own reaction short. Sharing news of the prize on Instagram, she wrote: “We are grateful.”