Ayo – actress – Murder in Pacot
FRED’s Angelo Acerbi meets Ayo, actress in Raoul Peck’s film “Murder in Pacot” from the 65th Berlin International Film Festival.
Knowing the reasons for an artistic choice is always fascinating. Talking to Ayo reveals to us her issues of being an artist, regardless if you act or sing, and also the impact that such a close look to a tragedy such as the Haiti earthquake had on her as a woman, a mother and a singer. An insightful talk with a wonderful woman
Plot: Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010. Streets, houses and bridges have collapsed and men in white protective gear are retrieving thousands of dead bodies. A middle-class couple’s large home in Port-au-Prince has also been badly damaged. A building authority orders the owners to renovate immediately otherwise their house will be pulled down. To raise the money needed for this, the couple moves into the former servants’ quarters and rents out the only habitable room in the house to the head of an international aid organisation named Alex. But the young man is not alone. He is accompanied by a 17-year-old Haitian woman named Andrémise, who wants to change her name to Jennifer in the hope that this will help her to meet foreigners. Andrémise’s provocative and positive approach to life and love soon throws the cat among the pigeons.
After his documentary Fatal Assistance Raoul Peck now takes a look at the effect of the earthquake on the country’s middle-class. Inspired by Pasolini’s classic 1968 work Teorema, Peck’s film is an intense and intimate drama about social contrasts that also poses fundamental questions about responsibility and justice in the face of catastrophe.