This Miami film festival creates spaces for Caribbean filmmakers to tell their stories
Jason Fitzroy Jeffers always wanted to make movies.
But growing up in Barbados, there wasn’t necessarily a pathway to filmmaking.
“In the 1980s, saying you want to be a filmmaker was akin to saying you want to be an astronaut,” Jeffers said.
After the success of his 2014 short film “Papa Machete,” which delves into the fading martial art of Haitian machete fencing, Jeffers and co-producer Keisha Rae Witherspoon wanted to make it easier for other Caribbean filmmakers. So the duo co-founded the Third Horizon filmmaking collective in 2014 then established the film festival two years later.
The Third Horizon Film Festival is “a space where Caribbean filmmakers can see each other’s works, collaborate, share best practices, pool resources, find funding,” said Jeffers.
After a hiatus last year, the festival will return in-person May 9-12 and virtually May 13-19 for its seventh iteration. A celebration of films that authentically highlight the Caribbean and its diaspora, the festival combines screenings and panel discussions that center on a region that’s often portrayed as an exotic playground in Western cinema. More than 20 countries will be represented across the festival’s nearly 40 films including the Dominican Republic (“Ramona”), Jamaica (“Coconut”) and Puerto Rico (“barrunto”).
“We wanted to make sure we were screening Caribbean films that were rooted in the ethics that considered the history of extractivism, the history of colonialism,” Jeffers said. The films, he continued, didn’t “have to explicitly be about colonialism” but they couldn’t make “a spectacle of the region or conform to the dictates of Hollywood.”
The festival’s focus on authentic Caribbean storytelling was rather eye opening to Monica Sorelle, who was a young aspiring filmmaker when she attended the first festival in 2016.
“To see yourself and your culture presented on screen in a way that was interesting, avant-garde, with care, experimental and just taking up space in a way that many people aren’t exposed to – I think that opened me up to a different way to tell stories,” said Sorelle.
Eight years later, Sorelle is now a rising star in the world of cinema. Her feature length debut “Mountains” earned her the Someone to Watch Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards as well as the Made in MIA Feature Film Award at the Miami Film Festival. Sorelle will serve as this year’s managing director for the Third Horizon Festival, a role that she defines as helping to “facilitate its transition” as its founders take a step back to focus on their own projects and as Miami’s art house cinema landscape is changing.
“So many of these venues and theaters are closing,” Sorelle said, referring to places like O Cinema in Wynwood, which hosted the first Third Horizon Film Festival but closed in 2019, and Tower Theater, which was taken over from Miami Dade College by the city of Miami in 2022 and is no longer showing films. “It’s really hard to find space in the city to put on an event like this, especially for such a small festival like us.”
Still, the festival has persisted thanks in part to its unique origins.
“It’s very rare to have a filmmaker run festival,” Jeffers said. “Usually you have film programmers on one side who run the festival and the filmmakers on the other.”
This year’s festival will feature a mix of feature narratives, documentaries, and short films across all genres. Additionally, the opening night at Perez Art Museum Miami will showcase the short films of six, Miami-based filmmakers who are part of the Third Horizon Forward Program, which helps Caribbean auteurs fund their project.
“As our films have been proven successful in the world,” Jeffers said, “we’ve been able to take some of the resources and connections that we make with these up-and-coming filmmakers.”
The 2024 iteration is particularly special for Ian Harnarine. In 2016, the Toronto-born filmmaker of Trinidadian descent debuted his short film entitled “Doubles With Slight Pepper” at Third Horizon Film Festival. Now, Harnarine’s latest project “Doubles,” a feature length version of the short which chronicles a Trinidadian street food vendor’s quest to find his father, will close the festival.
“What’s so meaningful to me is that it’s a primarily a Caribbean audience,” Harnarine said. “To screen in a place where I know these people are really colleagues, for them to select my film is a huge honor because it’s kind of a culmination of the festival. It makes me feel a sense of pride, gratefulness but also grace.”
As Harnarine later said, the Third Horizon Film Festival makes “you feel at home.”
IF YOU GO:
WHAT: Third Horizon Film Festival
WHEN: May 9-12 (in-person); May 13-19 (virtual)
WHERE: Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami (opening party May 9); Miami Dade College Koubek Center, 2705 SW Third St., Miami
TICKETS: $15-$225
