By: Maxime Jean-Baptiste Country: French Guiana, Belgium, France Language: French Guianese Creole, French w/English Subs Duration: 76 mins Year: 2024 Genre: Hybrid Melrick, a 13-year-old boy, spends his summer vacation with his grandmother Nicole in Cayenne, French Guiana. His presence and his desire to learn how to play the drum brings back the specter [...]

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION Filmmaking as process is at the heart of these five films, memorably imaginative attempts at working through a variety of themes, and towards new ways of understanding. A Q&A with filmmakers whose work appears in this program will follow the screening. NOBODY’S WORD By Camara Taylor | 13 mins | 2025 [...]

By: Abdenour Zahzah Country: Algeria, France Language: Arabic, French w/English Subs Duration: 90 mins Year: 2024 Genre: Fiction SYNOPSIS 1953, colonized Algeria. Frantz Fanon, a young black psychiatrist from Martinique, is appointed head doctor at the Blida-Joinville Hospital. As he puts his theories of “institutional psychotherapy” into practice in opposition to the racist theories [...]

This panel explores Caribbean heritage cinema as a tool for resistance, community action, and historical documentation. Centered on the films in the THFF25 retrospective You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985, this discussion will examine the socio-political landscapes that shaped these films, the often collective filmmaking practices behind them, and [...]

By: Natalia Lassalle-Morillo Country: Puerto Rico Language: English and Spanish w/English Subs Duration: 63 mins Year: 2024 Genre: Non-Fiction SYNOPSIS En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I) is a reassemblage of the Greek myth of Antigone in collaboration with a cast of non-professional actors who reside in New York City’s Puerto Rican diasporic community. Developed [...]

By Ben Dupuy and Kim Ives | 77 mins | 1983 | Haiti Filmed clandestinely under the Duvalier dictatorship, Bitter Cane, presented at THFF25 in a brand new restoration, is an incisive documentary interrogation of the exploitation and domination of the Haitian people. From peasant coffee farms in the rugged tropical mountains to steamy [...]

By: Ben Dupuy, Kim Ives Country: Haiti Language: Kreyòl, French, and English, w/English subtitles Duration: 77 mins Year: 1983 Genre: Non-Fiction SYNOPSIS Filmed clandestinely under the Duvalier dictatorship, Bitter Cane, presented at THFF25 in a brand new restoration, is an incisive documentary interrogation of the exploitation and domination of the Haitian people. From peasant [...]

By: Yoel Morales Country: Dominican Republic Language: Spanish w/English Subs Duration: 80 mins Year: 2024 Genre: Fiction SYNOPSIS A raw vision of love in a hostile Caribbean city, Bionico’s Bachata is a mockumentary that follows a hopeless romantic, addicted to crack, who must take control of his life if he wants to marry the [...]

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION 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. REDEMPTON (AN EXPERIENCE IN THREE PARTS) By Mariana [...]

By: Johanné Gómez Terrero Country: Dominican Republic, Canary Islands Language: Spanish w/English Subs Duration: 90 mins Year: 2024 Genre: Fiction SYNOPSIS Makenya leaves behind fun and dancing with her friends in search for work, after an unwanted pregnancy confronts her with sudden adulthood. The teenager lives alongside her grandfather and mother in the Batey, [...]

How can cinema serve as an act of healing, and/or reckon with the consequences of violence? This panel explores the ways filmmakers engage with the long-term psychological effects of colonialism, state violence, and personal loss. Rather than focusing on direct representations of violence, films like Kouté vwa, True Chronicle of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric [...]

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION Employing a variety of cinematic forms and strategies, the five films in this programme engender lingering, often poetic diasporic dialogues—between here and there, then and now. BISAGRAS By Luis Arias | 16 mins | 2024 | Senegal, Brazil, USA "Bisagras" is a film exploring the enduring here and elsewhere of black [...]