![]() “When talking about the Dominican countryside, it is almost impossible not to include these elements,” says Tonos, who was born and raised in Santo Domingo, the country’s capital. Unlike the disturbing Ysrael before it, and the urban reality of Cristo Rey afterwards, La hija natural is a poignant tale set in the campo, the countryside, with supernatural aspects that recall Gabriel García Márquez and the magical realist school of Latin American writers who followed him. It would be nearly a decade before she was able to complete her own first feature, La hija natural ( Love Child). On her return to the Dominican Republic, saddled with a graduate’s debt, Tonos threw herself into film and television production work. In the end, however, permission was granted, and the finished film was selected to represent the London Film School at several film festivals. ![]() He was extremely surprised, but I was even more surprised when he said yes, he loved the idea.” Dealing with Díaz’s publisher was not as easy. “I managed to get Junot’s number in New York through a friend,” she says. Getting Diaz’s go-ahead to shoot the film turned out not to be the labour she feared it would. “I felt really attracted to the character’s contradictions.” “I chose ‘Ysrael’ because the idea of having this deformed kid think of himself as a superhero was just fascinating for me,” she tells me in an email from her home in Santo Domingo, in English that elegantly belies her declaration of a lack of fluency in her second language. ![]() The account of a boy who wears a mask because his face was eaten by a pig, “Ysrael” is, to say the least, an unsettling story.īut Tonos wasn’t interested in bringing Díaz’s story to the screen for any prurient shock value it might have. At the London Film School, where in 2001 she completed her filmmaking studies, Tonos decided to make an adaptation of “Ysrael”, a short story by her compatriot (and patron saint of American postgraduate writing courses) Junot Díaz, as her thesis film. Telling tough stories is not something Tonos is unaccustomed to. Cristo Rey is politically minded social-realist filmmaking at its most unapologetically provocative - albeit with an appealingly emotional narrative at its hot, pulsing heart. Inspired by Romeo and Juliet, the ur-text for tales of ill-fated lovers everywhere, and channeling the gritty urban mood and style of cinematic forebears like the Brazilian film City of God and the Jamaican classic The Harder They Come, Tonos’s film has the urgent feel of a story ripped from the daily headlines. Janvier and Jocelyn live in the barrio of Cristo Rey (Christ the Redeemer), where casual discrimination and police harassment - as is the case throughout the DR - are commonplace for the Haitian and Haitian-descended population, and violence is not unknown. Cristo Rey, the second feature film written and directed by rising DR filmmaker Leticia Tonos, had its world premiere at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival.Ĭristo Rey follows the fortunes of two young people in love: Janvier, who is of mixed Haitian and Dominican blood, and Jocelyn, a Dominicana. Last September, too, another event of significance to the Dominican Republic took place, one not unrelated to the court’s decision. Everyone born after that year without at least one parent of Dominican blood - most of the entire Haitian-Dominican population of a million people - was retroactively rendered stateless. In a ruling viewed throughout the Caribbean and beyond as a human-rights catastrophe, the country’s constitutional court voted to denationalise all people of Haitian descent born in the DR after 1929. Jocelyn and Janvier end up falling in love, and must devise a plan to escape Cristo Rey, where no future for the two of them seems possible.On 23 September, 2013, an extraordinary event occurred in the Dominican Republic. ![]() He becomes determined to get her back, no matter the cost. Rudy, who is Dominican, used to be in a relationship with Jocelyn, and cannot abide the thought of Janvier spending time with her. He is assigned the job of looking after the gang leader's sister, Jocelyn. ![]() Because of his Haitian roots, Janvier is recruited by the drug trafficking gang that rules the Cristo Rey barrio. Janvier and Rudy are half-brothers who are fighting for the love of the same woman. Haitians and Dominicans are living in the Santo Domingo slums, where the two groups are at violent odds in a turbulent political and social climate. It was selected as the Dominican entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards, but was not nominated. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Cristo Rey is a 2013 Dominican Republic drama film written and directed by Leticia Tonos. ![]()
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