Agwe (Samuel Suffren, 2022) begins and ends at sea. For its protagonists, the sea is both salvation and damnation. Agwe tells a love story, the sacrifice of a couple subjugated by hostile life circumstances. François and Mirlande place the fate of their love and the future of the child she carries in her womb in the possibility of leaving the fishing village where they live, in Haiti, and reaching the United States. François tells a friend as they fish: "I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I have to leave. I can't stay here any longer and watch the situation get worse. The sea is the only way.”

In Haitian vodou, Agwe is the patron saint of fishermen. That is the name François chooses for his son when he is about to leave for the United States in a rather precarious boat loaded with people. Mirlande watches it sail away in the hope of seeing her companion soon; with the illusion that, in a short time, the three of them (them and their son) will be reunited in better living conditions.

Facing the dangers of this sea voyage is a bet for tomorrow, for happiness. In an inhospitable rural environment, this pair of lovers subsist, stricken by poverty, hunger, health insecurity, and the absolute lack of opportunities. The description of the setting - solved by Suffren with dramatic economy - makes it possible to explain the characters' decisions; no words are needed. In a certain scene, Mirlande, pregnant, resignedly picks up her fish stall, her face dismayed and her body exhausted; in this brief sequence, her uneasiness becomes apparent and François' American dream is justified.

When François comments to his wife, during dinner, in the dim light of the small house where they live, that a boat will soon be leaving for the United States, and that he should take advantage of the opportunity, she immediately replies, with an expression of astonishment: "What am I going to do alone without you? A moment later, they both frolic, embrace, and laugh loudly in bed, excited by the very idea of a better life. The danger of the journey fades for a few seconds.

This story is woven under the declared purpose of addressing the migration tragedy in Haiti. But the filmmaker is not interested in the inhuman hardships of the crossing, in the accidents of the journey; perhaps the profile most attended to by cinema. Suffren - who competes with this film at the IV INSTAR Film Festival (December 4-10) - takes the focus away from the experience of those who leave and places it on those who stay; he examines the impact of emigration on those who wait, in silence, like Mirlande, suffocated by uncertainty and loneliness.

Without too many parliaments or dramatic accents, with a limpid handling of the emotional curves of the characters, Suffren describes the inner schism of a woman who, after ten years, still hopes to be reunited with her husband. With no news, with her son grown up, she does not know if François has reached his destination or perished in the attempt. However, nothing will make her give up the man she once swore to love on the waters where she now evokes Agwe.

One of the virtues of this short film is its intelligent dramatic articulation. The story is not plotted as a succession of actions, as a chain of causes and effects, as might be expected after the first few minutes. Once the characters are introduced, the ethos of the village is described, and the director rehearses some subtle temporal curves and visual and narrative ellipses that, in addition to conferring synthesis to the story, favor its penetration into the affective and familiar cosmos of the characters. The organic time jump that shifts the plot by about ten years is striking; in this way, the wear and tear and, at the same time, the resistance of the protagonist, now accompanied by the child, naïve, perhaps, before the mother's pain, is underlined at a dramatic level and described at a visual level. A succession of contemplative shots - of documentary quality and iconically elaborated - define Mirlande's existential abyss.