Art House Theater Day: SUGAR ISLAND

Art House Theater Day“An important and very promising debut.”—Marc van de Klashorst, International Cinephile Society“This is a film about girlhood, but it is also about labor history. It is about pregnancy, but also colonialism. It is about Blackness, migration, and memory. Yet somehow, despite carrying all these themes, the film never loses its emotional core.”—Mercedes Diane Griffin Forbes, DG SpeaksMakenya leaves behind fun and dancing with her friends in search of work when an unwanted pregnancy confronts her with sudden adulthood. The teenager lives alongside her grandfather and mother in the Batey—a Dominican-Haitian community of sugarcane workers. The mother is a servant of the Mysteries within the 21 divisions of Afro-Dominican spirituality, and the grandfather an activist for pension rights. The mechanization of the sugar industry threatens to displace them without compensation. The family resists the change. Makenya reunites with her friends in a parallel and Afro-futuristic dimension. In a theatrical exercise, they read documents from the colonial era, recall the black uprisings on the island, and recover ancestral knowledge that forms a sort of anti-racist and decolonial manifesto.