Ancestral echoes reverberate across the films in this programme, embodying various forms of resistance and resilience, from the Florida Everglades to a Jamaican sugar plantation to the Amazon rainforest.
A Q&A with filmmakers whose work appears in this program will follow the screening.
2705 SW 3rd St, Miami, FL 33135
REDEMPTON (A SHORT FILM IN Three PARTS) (PART 1)
By Mariana Luiza | 3 mins, 10 mins, 16 mins | 2023 | Brasil
Is it possible to redeem a nation that once sought to exterminate the majority of its people?
In 1911, Brazil presented an audacious plan at the First Universal Congress of Races in London: to become a predominantly white nation within a century, exterminating Black and mestizo people within three generations, and transforming into a fully white country by 2012. The painting Ham’s Redemption (1895), by Modesto Brocos, exhibited during the congress, symbolized Brazil’s racial whitening ideology.
Over 110 years later, Redemption critically examines Brazil’s whitening policy, providing a counter-colonial response. The film, presented in three acts, revisits this history through archival imagery and symbolism, exposing the lasting impact of eugenicist ideologies. At its core, it challenges the narrative of Ham’s Redemption, replacing the imposed vision of racial erasure with one that honors ancestral knowledge and the resilience of Black and Indigenous communities.
HIJA DE FLORINDA (FLORINDA’S DAUGHTER)
By Shenny De Los Ángeles and Amanda Morell (iiritu) | 12 mins | 2025 | USA
Through a series of black-and-white tableaux, this poetry film follows the journey of Young Naomi in Everglades, Florida. She learns from Florinda, her grandmother, about the ancestral practices of caring for the land and nurturing grief in the face of environmental challenges. As the story unfolds, we grow to understand Florinda’s indigenous teachings of controlled burns and the importance of embracing fire rather than suppressing it. As the prescribed burns ignite from Florinda’s hands, an archival portal is birthed.
REDEMPTON (A SHORT FILM IN Three PARTS) (PART 2)
By Mariana Luiza | 3 mins, 10 mins, 16 mins | 2023 | Brasil
By Kat Anderson | 25 mins | 2024 | Jamaica, UK
Las, Fiya (Last, Fire) is a fictional short film that uses the horror genre to explore the subjects of ancestral trauma, dispossession, and the power of return/retrieval. Shot largely on an existing sugarcane farm in Jamaica, the film weaves historical methods of harvesting sugarcane and sugar production with the cinematic concept of the “origin story”. At the film’s center is Lil, a solo traveller, who is led by a spirit to a rural cane farm and reborn as a super-villain. A trans-dimensional evil entity preys upon a group of unsuspecting tourists, with their fate being revealed in a final heightened scene, where all are gathered on the cane farm for “reaping time.”
REDEMPTON (A SHORT FILM IN Three PARTS) (PART 3)
By Mariana Luiza | 3 mins, 10 mins, 16 mins | 2023 | Brasil
