Third Horizon Film Festival pushes boundaries with Caribbean stories
For Jonathan Ali, the Third Horizon Film Festival is a platform — one that elevates "cutting-edge Caribbean cinema" and showcases the region, its politics and its diaspora.
Why it matters: Since its inaugural year in 2016, Ali, the event's director of programming, said the festival has built a reputation for featuring works that push boundaries and wouldn't otherwise be shown in Miami.
Driving the news: The festival's eighth edition begins Thursday night and runs through the weekend, with multiple daily screenings at the Koubek Center.
The event's opening film, screening Thursday night at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and followed by an opening party, is "Koutkekout (At All Kosts)," a documentary from Haiti by director Joseph Hill.
State of cinema: This year's festival is built around a retrospective of restored films, Ali explained, comprising four films that center themes of labor and workers' rights.
"You Don't Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985," includes four films: three documentaries, featuring stories from Haiti, Jamaica and Suriname, and a fiction feature.
What they're saying:"What they all have in common, in particular the three documentaries, is that they focus on the struggle of workers' rights, labor organizing and people's struggles against often-oppressive capitalistic systems of labor and work," Ali said.
The fourth film, "West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979)," is part musical, part theatre, and examines nearly 400 years of colonialism in the Caribbean.
That film will close out the festival with a Sunday night screening.
In curating this year's lineup, the festival aimed to use cinema as a "socially and politically disruptive tool," though the event itself is not tied to any particular political moment, Ali said.
"For us, as Caribbean and diaspora artists and curators, we have always believed in and championed the political possibility of art," whether that's sparking conversation or the imagination, he said.
The region's "history of colonialism, exploitation and a longstanding process of resistance and resilience" is "reflected in the films we show and the art we platform," he added.
What we're watching: This year's lineup also includes new and recent films, mostly documentaries, from different countries, free-to-attend panels with filmmakers and events around the city.
Plus, this year's festival includes "something we've never really done before," said Ali: A multimedia live performance with "A Freedom Struggle: Looking for Lucrecia Pérez."
The live performance, by Dominican artist and filmmaker Génesis Valenzuela, examines the "challenge of investigating the colonial wound" and how it presents currently in the body. (Valenzuela will participate in a Q&A after the performance.)
The intrigue: The festival's organizers deliberately keep it short and intimate. Despite it lasting just a few days, there is no counterprogramming, meaning no films overlap in screen time.
"We want people to be experiencing things together in solidarity and community," Ali said.
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