A Haitian American mother travels to West Africa with her children to encounter Voodun where it lives, in ritual, in community in marketplaces, in nature and to ask what must be carried forward.
DIRECTOR
Sandra is a first-generation Haitian American storyteller whose work explores inheritance, memory, and the spaces where spirit and daily life meet.For nearly two decades, she worked in community engagement, guiding conversations across difference and change. Leave the Bones is her first feature documentary — a return to questions she has carried since childhood, and now shares with her children. Her work begins with listening — to people, to place, and to what moves quietly between generations.THEMES
Intergenerational Memory
Voodun as Living Practice
SYNOPSIS
There are things we inherit without being told.
Stories carried in the body.
Silences passed gently from one generation to the next.In Leave the Bones, Sandra and her family travel to Benin, Togo and Ghana with her children — not as tourists, but as witnesses. Together, they step into spaces where Voodun is not feared or sensationalized, but woven into daily life. In markets where sacred objects sit beside fruit and fabric. In ceremonies where drums call not for spectacle, but for presence. In gatherings where memory is held in the hands.
What begins as a personal inquiry becomes an intergenerational conversation.
Between mother and children.
Between diaspora and origin.
Between what was misunderstood and what was always rooted in love.This is not a film that explains Voodun.
It is a film that sits with it.
A film about lineage.
About women as the fifth element.
About the quiet strength of cultural survival.And about the tenderness of choosing what to carry forward -
so that the next generation may inherit something freer.
TRAILER
Watch the first look long trailer
In Development
Benin | Togo | Ghana | United States
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