Directed by Sharon Lewis
Canada | 2017 | 83 mins

Inspired by Hugo Award nominated author Nalo Hopkinson’s treasured 1998 novel “Brown Girl in the Ring” comes the feature film “Brown Girl Begins.” 

Nestled in Caribbean folklore, and taking place on an island inhabited solely by the poor right off the coast of dystopian Toronto, Canada, “Brown Girl Begins,” presents the novel’s hero, Ti-Jeanne, a few years younger than in the novel.  Ti-Jeanne, has the power to save her exiled people from the pervasive crime and poverty on her island, but is deathly afraid to accept the inheritance of her grandmother’s voodoo-priestess gifts.  The same possession ritual she witnessed killing her mother years ago, she must also undertake.

In her reluctance, Ti-Jeanne, flees with her young love Tony in hope of leaving the spirit business behind.  But when an evil drug lord uses extreme measures on the population to unwillingly prepare them as smart slaves to the affluent mainlanders, Ti-Jeanne, is forced to choose between young love and her legacy – or her people will die.

Directed by Sharon Lewis, and fully imbuing Hopkinson’s exploration of class, race, sexuality, and Caribbean-bred fantasy elements, “Brown Girl Begins,” is the first Caribbean-Canadian science-fiction feature film ever made.  In 2015, Lewis led a successful crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the film.  In presenting Ti-Jeanne, in a 2017 BlackGirlNerds.com interview, Lewis says of her protagonist, she is “at the center of her own story, she is the agent in her own story. She is complex, flawed, and what I hope is a challenge to the way Black women are historically portrayed in the media as either a madonna — the asexual best friend, momma figure, or the over-sexualized Black woman who is “sassy and sexy.”

Says Lewis, in a SyFy.com interview, “People of color not only belong in the future, we are the ones that will save us all in the dystopian future.”

Preceded by

S0.CI3.TY

Directed by Khris Burton
Martinique | 2016 | 27 min

J0.hn, an emotionless and regulated citizen of THE CITY, awakes on a deserted island 10, 000 miles away from civilization. Equipped with the R3G, a symbiotic watch ruled by a very advanced A.I that regulates his emotions and keeps him indefinitely “operational,” J0.hn starts to plan his own rescue but things get radically complicated…