A Day’s Dispatch from Third Horizon Film Festival 2024

Ramona (dir. Victoria Linares). Courtesy THFF.">

For the Caribbean expat, the dewy heat and tropical flora of Little Havana is a kind of homecoming in itself. Doubly so in this writer’s case, as the child of West Indian migrants flying from Brooklyn to my former home of South Florida for the seventh Third Horizon Film Festival. Though events were spread across four days, my itinerary allowed only one day to soak up as much as I could.

Naturally, as a festival featuring films from the Caribbean and its varied diasporas but hosted in Miami, Florida, Third Horizon homes in on the topics of place, distance, memory, and their absences. Even the festival’s primary venue, the Mediterranean-style Koubek Center commissioned by an Austrian trader in 1929, evoked the historical materialism drawing us all together. Fueled by café con leche and pan tostada, I entered the chilly theater at 10 a.m. (Caribbean time) brimming with, if not straightforward nostalgia, then a complex familiarity.

Founded in 2016, the Miami-based film collective Third Horizon has been supporting “the vibrant voices of Caribbean, its diaspora, and beyond,” as stated by Festival Managing Director Monica Sorelle. Whatever vehicle might be fit to ride a new wave of Caribbean cinema, it would seem that Third Horizon is at the helm, gaining momentum in their efforts through awards won over the years and a collection of thirteen shorts released on Criterion Channel in fall 2023. The name “Third Horizon” itself nods to traditions of Third Cinema—politically engaged, non-hierarchical filmmaking practices used to depict the so-called third world—as well as the horizon as a source of hope; a site of unseen potential just within reach.

Fabulation as a response to absent memory figures heavily into the first shorts block of the day, “Sometimes I Imagine You Lonely”—the program’s title pulled from dialogue in the brief but totally affecting film Canto Errante (Wandering Song) (2022) by Génesis Valenzuela. Its exquisite photography of a homely bedroom accompanied by audio from a phone conversation between father and daughter typify the block’s overarching meditations on the temporal dimensions of familial ties.

Each confrontation of the past is a struggle against ephemerality. FATHERSPY (2023), directed by Humberto González Bustillo, makes use of black-and-white stills of the filmmaker's father prior to his disappearance. “Everyone in the family knows that he’s a spy,” he says in a voiceover which foregrounds an unsettling aural score. The result is chilling and laden with unanswered questions, as life often is.

By contrast, Retrospection of a Home (Once Upon A Time…), directed by Sebastian Marcano-Pérez, maintains a comic levity. Family members take turns drawing the floorplan of their former home, sketching with a marker and tacking on additional sheets of paper to nag and correct the last family member’s faulty recollection. Viewers are left with a blurry palimpsest of alternative memories, each attempt superimposed on the last and ultimately unverifiable, with the only remaining evidence of the former home being a home video of kids playing in the living room.

Coconut (dir. Jard Lerebours). Courtesy THFF.">

Films like Jard Lerebours’s Coconut and Elizabeth Webb’s Proximity Studies (Sight Lines) (both 2022) explore absence through visual omission. Coconut offers a lush jazz soundtrack and a poetic eulogy written and read by Lerebours over Super 8 film recorded at their grandmother’s funeral in Jamaica, however her image is never shown. Similarly, Proximity Studies includes stories about director Elizabeth Webb’s grandfather who she never met and never shows on screen. Lack of image at once forecloses certainty and leaves room for imaginative possibility.

Even family can be rediscovered or reinvented; films like Raydrick Feliciana’s Raiz (2024), Vi Tuong Bui’s Thoi Tho Au (Childhood) (2023), and Nande Walters’s Soon Come Back (2023) are proof of this through use of family interviews, archival footage, and genealogical research. Such themes persist in the panel “Cinema for Reconciliation: Personal Filmmaking, Family, Community and Memory” hosted in a room stuffed to the gills with hungry listeners, many scarfing down jerk chicken and macaroni salad as much as the speakers’ words.

Following a lunch of fried turkey, rice and peas, banane peze, and pikliz shared by a most generous friend, I saw what would be my favorite film of the day: Ramona (2023). Victoria Linares’s film follows an actress who, in preparation for a role as a pregnant teenage runaway, interviews real pregnant teenagers to better understand her character. As the teenagers are brought deeper into the fold as sources and consultants, the actress reckons with her position as a middle-class voyeur of their world. Should she step back and let the young women step into the role of Ramona? Fiction and reality become inextricable, and the film cracks open to reveal a rare site of play and healing amongst women—Linares mentioned purposely avoiding making any male figures instrumental in the plot—despite the often harsh experience of teen pregnancy. Furthermore, Ramona demonstrates a sensitivity to the sociopolitical ramifications of filming a given subject; concerns of not only story, but also the means of production.

I have been thinking about the political debts of film qua film and art qua arts institutions, particularly in this present time of perpetual violence. As war and destruction ravage much of the world in Third Horizon’s stated purview—from Haiti to Congo to Palestine and further—it seems that despite their small size, the collective wishes to bake political awareness and critique into its efforts at scaling up. But what form can precise political critique take in the world of art?

There is the camp that argues all art is political and another that argues art should be allowed to be apolitical entertainment and a form of escape. While I lean toward the former camp, both scenarios can exist at once, and often the political ramifications of “apolitical art” are unknown to both audience and creator, however willfully. Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman’s experimental film Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023), shown in the second film block of the day, does not shy away from either content or form, politics or fantastical escape.

Hypnotic soundscapes and drone shots of spectacular landscapes—sand dunes, salt lakes, open skies—frame realities of plunder such as cobalt extraction used to make the phones in all of our pockets, unearthed according to mandates of human exploitation and racial capitalism. I wonder though, how apt is experimental film for communicating political critiques and directives? Or any film for that matter?

The answer lies in the precision with which the reflexive artist/viewer is able and willing to communicate/receive collectivist political imperatives and engage dialectically with the physical world as much as the theoretical. In the Caribbean and its diasporas, we are acutely aware of the ongoing violence of colonialism. At the festival, there were attendees of vastly different physical appearances, yet all connected by a ghost story; colonial encounters akin to a science fiction plot, forged in unspeakable horrors, yet now borne to comforts of recognition and joys like this present gathering. Chatting with other filmmakers throughout the day, talking to strangers by the food truck or coffee bar as though they were old friends, there was a feeling of being in exactly the right place at the right time.

I left as the filmmaker dinner was being served before the real bacchanal began. For me, riding away in the breezy night on I-95 North, back to my family’s home which now seemed both incidental and destined, the lasting sensation could be described as cultural euphoria. This is a feeling I imagine will follow me out of cinemas, onto Brooklyn streets, and into my apartment building where the scent of ackee and saltfish lingers on Sunday afternoons. THFF24 shared not only rare sights, but a way of seeing through a decolonial lens, should we look just over the horizon and be precise about what we wish to see.