Sugar Island

The Afterlives of Sugar brings together films that consider the sugar economy not just as an industry but as a foundational structure of colonial modernity. Moving between Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, this series reveals the violence of the plantation not as a relic of the past, but as a structure whose afterlives continue to shape the present. 

Set in a Dominican-Haitian batey community surrounded by sugarcane fields, Sugar Island (2024) follows Makenya, a teenager whose unwanted pregnancy forces a sudden confrontation with adulthood. As mechanisation threatens the livelihoods of sugar workers and her family faces displacement, Makenya travels to a parallel dimension where she is faced with evidence of Hispaniola’s colonial and revolutionary history. Blending social realism with Afrofuturist gestures, the film envisions ancestral memory as a foundation for collective resistance. 

As the contemporary anchor of The Afterlives of Sugar, Sugar Island harnesses fictive and documentary modes to examine labour precarity in the Dominican Republic. Director Johanné Gómez Terrero connects the historical violence of sugar production to statelessness and anti-Haitian racism under these conditions.

Doors open at 2.30pm; event starts at 3pm and ends at 5pm. 

Image credit: still from Sugar Island, 2024, Johanné Gómez Terrero.