MIAMI — The Miami Film Festival will host the World Premiere of Dual Citizen, a deeply personal and insightful documentary by filmmaker Rachelle Salnave. The film examines identity, exile, and the emotional complexity of belonging across borders.
Film Highlights
Dual Citizen follows Salnave and her father, Edouard, on an unexpected journey to reclaim Haitian citizenship after Haiti’s landmark 2012 constitutional amendment allowing dual nationality. For Edouard, a proud Haitian American who has lived in political exile since the 1960s, the process forces him to confront a homeland he thought he had left behind. Meanwhile, for his daughter, it becomes a generational exploration of heritage, loyalty, and what it truly means to belong. The film blends humor, warmth, and honesty. Furthermore, it navigates family dynamics, political history, and the contradictions of holding two passports—and two identities.
Rooted in lived experience, Dual Citizen resonates strongly with Miami’s Haitian and Caribbean communities. In these communities, questions of migration, national identity, and diaspora are part of everyday life.
The film is both an intimate father–daughter portrait and a broader meditation on citizenship, memory, and cultural inheritance. It offers a rare, human‑scale lens on policies that profoundly shape lives.
World Premiere Screening Details:
- Film: Dual Citizen
- Occasion: World Premiere
- Festival: Miami Film Festival
- Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026
- Time: 7:30 PM
- Venue: Little Haiti Cultural Complex (212–260 NE 59th Terrace, Miami, FL 33137)
- Program: Made in MIA
- Special Event: Post‑screening discussion with filmmaker Rachelle Salnave
- Purchase Tickets: Dual Citizen – Miami Film Festival
Recipient of The Louies
The film is also a recipient of The Louies, a prestigious Miami Film Festival initiative supporting local documentary filmmakers, further underscoring its cultural significance and relevance to South Florida audiences. [news.mdc.edu]
The World Premiere at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex offers a fitting home for a film that speaks directly to the complexities, humor, and resilience of Haitian identity in the diaspora. Through its candid storytelling and intergenerational lens, Dual Citizen invites audiences to reconsider what citizenship means—legally, culturally, and emotionally. This is especially relevant in an increasingly transnational world.
