Sugar Island
by Johanné Gómez Terrero
Dominican Republic, Spain, 2024
streaming regions: GLOBAL with some exceptions
synopsis
Makenya leaves behind fun and dancing with her friends in search of work, but an unwanted pregnancy confronts her with a sudden adulthood. The teenager lives with her Grandfather and her Mother in the Batey, a Dominican Haitian community of sugarcane workers. Her Mother is a servant of the Misterios within the 21 Divisions, an Afro Dominican religious tradition, and her Grandfather is an activist fighting for the right to pensions. The mechanization of the sugar industry threatens to leave them displaced and without compensation. The family resists change. Makenya meets with her friends in a parallel and Afrofuturist dimension, where, through a theatrical exercise, they read documents from the colonial era, recall the Black uprisings of the Island, and recover ancestral knowledge that takes shape as a kind of anti racist and decolonial manifesto. Makenya manages to find work at the town fair selling cotton candy, but quickly discovers that work does not guarantee the freedom she had hoped for, and a certain loss of innocence takes place. Frustration opens the door to her dimension of social activism. She accompanies her Grandfather to protests demanding justice for sugarcane workers and later receives the Misterios through the guidance of her Mother. She finds her power.
