This Is Where I Sleep - Naesha
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Twelve-year-old Naesha lives with her mother in a small rebuilt house above Port-au-Prince after Haiti's 2010 earthquake, holding onto her joy and her dream of becoming a teacher.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a perfectly nice portrait of resilience-after-disaster, which means it's exactly the kind of consensus documentary that puts me to sleep; there's nothing here that ruptures the form or asks uncomfortable questions about how we consume other people's survival.
The film sits gracefully within the observational documentary tradition, its formal restraint and attention to quotidian detail in Naesha's life demonstrating the kind of ethical filmmaking that honors its subject without aestheticizing trauma.
The decision to let Naesha's voice and her specific gestures—the way she moves through her rebuilt space, her particular cadence when she speaks about teaching—carry the entire narrative rather than imposing score or external commentary is what makes five minutes feel like a complete world.