Stay with Me: Accumulating Trauma and Grief

Samuel Ladouceur’s 9-minute Stay with Me, written by Yanatha Desouvre, is a tragedy spun with autobiographical elements. Spanning a fateful lunch between a mother and son, the film tries to show the sheer weight of the bad coincidence of losing loved ones in the same way over and over. 

Set in Haiti, shot in Little Haiti, Miami, the story follows Grayson (Akili McDowell) out of the memory of his best friend’s death and into the real world where his mother, Margaret (Geegee Rock) and he are sharing a pizza in between a life of danger and duty. She is an investigative journalist in a land rocked by turmoil. Non-fictional footage of actual unrest in Haiti enters soon into the scene, adding weight to an otherwise domestic film. Domestic inasmuch it makes the portrayal of the mother-son relationship its core. 

The relationship is sweet, of course, but the writing also adds in the crucial kind of teasing that comes with familiarity. It is mild and all the better for it. They talk about crushes, family, national wounds and Margaret’s role in it. The resonant thing of this last is that anyone in Margaret’s position would do what she is—duty to truth, integrity, and the hope for better days—and anyone in Grayson’s position would also do what he is—ask his mother to not make him live with the fear of the worst everytime she goes to work. You could not side with either at the cost of the other. 

The tragedy is that their conflict is to be upstaged by other, less understandable ones by less understanding ones. Stay with Me is ambitious in the scope of emotion and history it has tried to cover, but its best moments are when it lets its principal characters sit back and like each other.  How many afternoons do we really get to do that?

Watch Stay with Me Short Film Trailer