Ésery Mondésir (b. Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is an artist living and working in Toronto. Before pursuing film, Mondésir worked as a high school teacher, book designer, and labour organizer. Mondésir’s community-based practice is anchored in music, archives, poetry, and sound, and explores themes of personal and collective memory. His transnational approach to filmmaking has led to a collaborative form of practice in which he often works with fellow members of the Haitian diaspora in Cuba, and Mexico. Mondésir’s films have been showcased in exhibitions and film festivals locally and internationally, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, George Eastman Museum (Rochester), Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach), Third Horizon Film Festival (Miami), Open City Festival (London), and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). He completed a Master of Fine Arts in Cinema Production at York University in 2017 and is an assistant professor at OCAD University.
For GTA24, Mondésir will present films from the recent past, including What Happens to a Dream Deferred (2019). Taking its title from a line in Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem”, one of the most influential poems of the 20th century, the film takes place on New Year’s Eve in Tijuana, Mexico, where a group of Haitian friends are making “soup joumou” to celebrate Haitian Independence Day. Also included in GTA24 are 16mm hand-processed films that trace various migrations in and out of Haiti across time.