In contemporary Caribbean documentary/hybrid/expanded cinema, incorporating performance is more than an aesthetic choice—it is a tool for reckoning with history, collective memory, and political struggle. Whether through theatrical staging, direct address to the camera, or the incorporation of live performance, artists and filmmakers use performance as a means of processing trauma, reclaiming agency, and reshaping dominant narratives.
This panel brings together THFF25 filmmakers Joseph Hillel (Koutkekout), Natalia Lasalle-Morillo (En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I)), and Génesis Valenzuela (the live performance A Freedom Struggle: Looking for Lucrecia Perez) to discuss how theater and performance function in their work. How does performance offer a way to navigate political upheaval, displacement, violence, and historical trauma? What is the relationship between performance as catharsis and as resistance? How does collective creation in theater translate to film? And how do artists balance the tension between theatricality and the real in storytelling?
