LOA, KILL YOUR MASTERS

Rosalie (14) has grown up oblivious to the suffering of her fellow black people on the sugarcane plantation. She was adopted by a French couple who shielded her with many privileges, including a slave girl as her best friend and carer. When the slave girl tragically dies, Rosalie runs away traumatized and gets lost in a cave where a LOA initiates her in the power of vodun (African spirituality), triggering a wandering path between personal revenge and collective justice that leads to the painful sacrifice of her privileges in order to bring havoc and liberty in the island. This historical fantasy reimagines the events related to slavery and its abolition in Haiti in the late 18th century, mixing a historically plausible representation of characters, traditions, and situations, with supernatural manifestations of vodun to offer an alternative solution to the revolutionary crisis that leads to emancipation and dignity.

My creative path is intertwined with the pathos of revolution. I dedicated my youth to using culture and art to support a political project that promised prosperity and social justice but delivered corruption and chaos. This dismay left me, and my generation, adrift with a big part of our identity, and purpose, broken. LOA started as an inquiry into the Zambos revolts in Venezuela to explore, perhaps reignite, our passion for the idea of revolution. This process made us dig deeper into the root of anti-colonial emancipation: Haiti, the crucible of transatlantic liberation, the cradle of human rights and the concept of universal emancipation. Animation can explore the horrors and horrifying beauty of war and injustice in ways that live-action cinema might struggle to achieve. In my previous animated shorts, I have tried to convey a sense of hope by portraying heart-reaching testimonies through unexpected visual metaphors, a process I’ll carry into this project. With LOA, I aim to carve a canal where the historical and the mythical flow through bold, unapologetic storytelling.

We chose animation as the language to tell this story as it is the most economically efficient yet highly artistic way of representing the LOA’s world, from the multiple historical periods and outdoor settings to the large-scale fights and hallucinating surreal sequences. The film will depict locations, costumes, and objects based on the period’s historiography, using a modern visual style of synthesized shapes, straight lines, and high contrast. With this juxtaposition, we want to hint at the contemporaneity of the subject matter: it’s a “period piece” but not really. The color palette will start cold and subdued, transitioning to warm and intense colors in the third act. The two sequences of Rosalie’s spiritual trance will reference Afro-Caribbean symbolism: disproportion of limbs and features, bright saturated colors over dark background, and paranormal relationships with space.