MIAMI — After a wildly successful inaugural year, Third Horizon Caribbean Film Festival returns to Miami from September 28 to October 1 at Pérez Art Museum Miami and O Cinema Wynwood with a curated line-up of acclaimed films from the Caribbean and its diaspora.
This year, the Third Horizon Caribbean Film Festival will showcase 10 feature films and 12 short films from countries such as Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, and launches on September 28 at 6pm at PAMM with the Florida premiere of Trinidadian director Vashti Anderson’s Moko Jumbie, fresh off its world premiere at LA Film Festival.
The screening with be followed by a party on the patio of the museum featuring Electric Punanny, the acclaimed Brooklyn-based DJ duo.
The entire film festival lineup and ticket sales can be found at Third Horizon Film Festival.
“In a historical moment where cultural diversity in the arts and our society at large is being threatened from so many angles, we feel even more determined to stage an event that highlights the stories, sounds and sights from what might be the most culturally diverse region in the world,” said Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Co-founder and Festival Director of Third Horizon. “As a melting pot of culture, the Caribbean shows us the way forward.”
The Third Horizon Caribbean Film Festival features several Florida premieres. The full lineup can be found here. Highlights include:
- Samba, directed by Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas’ Samba, which world-premiered at Tribeca Film Festival 2017. The tense drama tells the tale of Cisco, a young man who returns home to the Domincan Republic after being incarcerated in the states. In order to support his alcoholic mother, he takes up street fighting under the tutelage of Nichi, a discgraced Italian boxer.
- Play the Devil, directed by Maria Govan. PTD premiered at LA Film Festival 2017 and concerns Gregory, a young man in Trinidad who carries his family’s hopes with him as he prepares for college. When he meets an older, successful businessman named James, he is pushed to discover himself creatively, professionally, and sexually. Confused about what direction to pursue, Gregory must make a changing-decision as the country gets ready for carnival.
- Sexy Durga, directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan. A hit at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2017 where it won the prestigious Tiger Award, Sexy Durga is a menacing, largely-improvised road movie which tells the story of Durga, a north Indian migrant who finds herself caught up in a nightmarish journey fraught with encounters with gun-runners, sexual terror and ancient rituals.
“Heading into our second edition, we have remained committed to presenting a carefully curated lineup of the best new and recent films from across the Caribbean and its diaspora—dramatic and documentary, and of varying lengths,” said Jonathan Ali, Director of Programming at Third Horizon. “This includes not only films that audiences will find conventionally pleasurable, but also work that is challenging and pushes boundaries both in terms of content and form. Our aim is to show that the thing that we extol as “Caribbean cinema” is as multifaceted, dynamic and surprising as the region itself.”
The festival was founded by Third Horizon, a Miami-based collective of Caribbean creatives whose first short film, Papa Machete, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014 and had its US premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015, before going on to screen at more than 30 film festivals worldwide. It is being staged in partnership with the Caribbean Film Academy, a Brooklyn-based not-for-profit organization whose core mission is to support and distribute the work of Caribbean filmmakers.
