The Caribbean Film Series returns on October 4th & 5th to the Brooklyn Academy of Music with two distinct film screenings representing the Caribbean diaspora.
Oct. 4 | 7:00 PM
Short Film Program
Personal works made with delicacy and care, the seven films in this shorts program find their makers reckoning with familial relationships across various histories of migration and diasporic longing.
With filmmakers Jard Lerebours, Nande Walters, and Sebastian Marcano-Pérez in attendance. Q&A to follow moderated by multidisciplinary artist Valerie Caesar.
Burnt Milk
Joseph Douglas Elmhirst / 2023 / Jamaica, UK / 10'
Burnt Milk centers around a monologue by Una, 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.
Canto Errante
Génesis Valenzuela / 2022 / Dominican Republic, Spain / 6'
A little girl narrates the myth of original sin: a tear in the garden of Eden. On the other side of the crack, inside a cold bare bedroom, a woman talks to her absent father. On the faded wall, a little piece of the lost paradise.
Soon Come Back
Nande Walters / 2023 / Jamaica, USA / 15’
In Soon Come Back, Nande Walters explores memory, or lack thereof, during a trip to visit her grandparents in Kingston, Jamaica. From her father’s childhood home in Kingston to her grandmother’s childhood home in the mountains of Negril, the filmmaker follows their migrations of leaving home as young adults, using the camera to bridge 22 years of oceanic distance between her, her grandmother, and her ancestral land.
Retrospection of a Home
Sebastian Marcano-Pérez / 2024 / USA / 9'
Retrospection of a Home (Once Upon a Time…) is a personal essay-film exploration into the collective memory of a Venezuelan family in exile, and the home they had to leave behind years ago.
Ca(r)milla
Kearra Amaya Gopee / 2023 / Trinidad and Tobago / 12'
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 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.
Dreams like Paper Boats
Samuel Suffren / 2024 / Haiti / 19’
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?
Coconut
Jard Lerebours / 2022 / Jamaica / 4'
Coconut details the director's trip to his mother's homeland of Jamaica to bury his grandmother, who was also his caretaker. Made from original Super 8mm footage filmed in Jamaica, as well as found footage, Coconut is a public declaration of love for Gladys Austin.
Oct. 5 | 7:00 PM
The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo
Richard Fung/ 2024 / Trinidad and Tobago | Canada / 84’
NY PREMIERE
post-screening Q&A with Richard Fung
Born in Trinidad in 1945, Harold Sonny Ladoo migrated to Canada as a young man with the fierce ambition of becoming a writer. In 1972 he published his first novel, No Pain Like This Body—a vivid and poetic, yet devastating depiction of life during Indian indentureship in Trinidad, and a now-recognized classic of Caribbean literature. Ladoo’s second novel, Yesterdays, one of the queerest works of Caribbean fiction, was published in 1974. The same year Ladoo’s battered body was found by a roadside in Trinidad. He was 28. Beyond his literary achievements, Ladoo’s life and death remain mysterious, in part because he kept reinventing his biography.
In The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, Richard Fung draws on a 20-year-old archive of video interviews by Trinidadian filmmaker Christopher Laird, a founder of the pioneering Trinidadian film and television production company, Banyan. Laird spoke with Ladoo’s family, Trinidad intimates, and members of the Canadian literary scene who helped advance Ladoo’s career in Toronto. Filmed in Trinidad and Toronto, the film attempts to piece together the puzzle of Ladoo’s complex, often tumultuous life, and his tragic death. Caribbean and Canadian-Caribbean authors Shani Mootoo, Kevin Jared Hosein, Andil Gosine, Ramabai Espinet, and David Chariandy voice Ladoo’s groundbreaking fiction, alongside animated drawings by Trinidadian artist Adam Williams.
This screening is presented in partnership with The Consulate General of Canada in New York and Brooklyn’s own The Center for Fiction.
