A nurse longs for her island in a cold, forbidding city. The ghosts of migrant laborers sing songs of lament and hope. A group of young people contemplate their relationship to their island. An island vampire exports life-sustaining home soil across the diaspora. Members of a family journey through blood-stained ancestral land. And a young father awaits word from his wife across the sea.
A Q&A with Joseph Douglas Elmhirst, Maya Jeffereis, Kearra Amaya Gopee, and Renee Royale will follow the screening.
2705 SW 3rd Street, Miami, FL 33135
Dir. Joseph Douglas Elmhirst / 10 minutes / 2023 / Jamaica
Burnt Milk centers around a monologue by Una (voiced by Tamara Lawrance), an isolated Jamaican woman in London. As she takes a moment of solace to make burnt milk, she is flooded with spiritual imagery that takes her home.
Dir. Maya Jeffereis/ 11 minutes / 2023 / United States
Fields Fallen from Distant Songs is an experimental film loosely inspired by the filmmaker’s great-grandparents’ history as Japanese immigrant laborers on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations. The film contends with contemporary questions of sovereignty, solidarity, and hauntings of the past as they persist in the present. A cross-temporal narrative unfolds as ghostly images flicker across the screen: found footage of workers on the plantations intersperse with Japanese folk songs, poetry, 16mm home movies shot by her grandfather in the 1960s, and the artist’s own footage of the eruption of Kīlauea in January 2023. The material, economic, and cultural connotations of sugar are inextricable from histories of migration and displacement, but Jeffereis attempts to reframe this narrative by exploring notions of rematriation, of returning ancestral land.
Dir. Aliha Thalien / 23 minutes / 2023 / Martinique
In Martinique, a curse upon men leads to their disappearance. A group of young friends meet and talk about their relationship to the island.
Dir. Kearra Amaya Gopee / 12 minutes / 2023 / Trinidad and Tobago
On its surface, Ca(r)milla appears to be an excerpt from a documentary surrounding the daily life of the owner of a small landscaping business in Trinidad. However, the business is quickly revealed to be a front—the owner, played by the filmmaker’s mother, Camilla, is a hybrid of a vampire and a soucouyant, with her true trade being the import/export of Caribbean soil throughout the Caribbean and its diasporas. Ca(r)milla is a braided essay featuring the voices of both Camilla and that of Dr. Patricia Vincent, a disgraced vampirologist with an explicit focus on vampirism in the Americas and the Caribbean.
Dir. Renee Royale / 2 minutes / 2024 / Barbados
Narrated by the artist’s aunt, Drax Sycorax shows Drax Hall’s modest Jacobean structure, St. Jude’s Cemetery where most of her paternal ancestors are buried, and Carlisle Bay, the port where merchant ships brought most enslaved people into Barbados.
Dir. Samuel Suffren / 19 minutes / 2024 / Haiti
Edouard has been living in Port-au-Prince with his daughter Zara for five years. Since his wife left, his daughter and him have only received an audio cassette from her, and that was a long time ago. After years of absence, what can we expect from a distant love?
