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SUGAR ISLAND

By Johanné GÓMEZ TERRERO

PATRA SPANOU FILM - as SALES All rights, World

Female director - Completed 2024

An unwanted pregnancy triggers the journey into adulthood for Makenya, a Dominican-Haitian teenager who lives in the Batey, a community surrounded by sugarcane fields.

Festivals
& Awards

BFI London FF 2024

Dare

Thessaloniki IFF 2024

Film Forward Competition

VENICE DAYS 2024

Awarded the Edipo Re Award and the Premio Fontazione Fai Persona Lavoro Ambiente

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Female director, First film, Drama
- Countries
- DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, SPAIN
- Languages
- SPANISH
- Duration
- 91 mn
- Director(s)
- Johanné GÓMEZ TERRERO
- Writer(s)
- Johanné GÓMEZ TERRERO
- Cast
- Yelida DIAZ, Ruth EMETERIO
- Producer(s)
- Fernando SANTOS DIAZ (Guasabara Cine), David BAUTE (TINGLADO FILM S.L.)
- Synopsis
- Makenya leaves behind fun and dancing with her friends in search for work; an unwanted pregnancy confronts her with sudden adulthood. The teenager lives alongside her grandfather and Mother in the Batey, a Dominican-Haitian community of sugarcane workers.
  The Mother is a servant of the Mysterious within the 21 divisions of Afro-Dominican spirituality, and the grandfather is an activist for pension rights. The mechanization of the sugar industry threatens to displace them without compensation. The family resists the change.
  Makenya reunites with her friends in a parallel and Afro-futuristic dimension. In a theatrical exercise, they read documents from the colonial era, recall the black uprisings on the island, and recover ancestral knowledge that forms a sort of anti-racist and decolonial manifesto.
  Makenya manages to work at the town fair selling cotton candy, but quickly discovers that the job does not guarantee her the freedom she had hoped for, leading to a certain loss of innocence. Frustration opens the door to her dimension of social activism; she accompanies her grandfather to protests demanding justice for the cane workers and later receives guidance from The Mysterious through her mother. She finds her power.

SUGAR ISLAND

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards