From the beginning of Johanné Gómez Terrero’s Sugar Island [+leggi anche:
intervista: Johanné Gómez Terrero
scheda film], Makenya (Yelidá Díaz) can no longer afford to be a teenager. Her unwanted pregnancy intrudes and rearranges her life for her, dispelling the carefree myth of teenhood – as carefree as it can be in a batey community. Shame cloaks her world, and everything has to change; at the same time, industrial mechanisation is taking over the hand-labour-based sugar-cane plantations slowly but surely. Not only are the belaboured traditions under threat, but so is the workers’ livelihood – the community could be displaced at any given moment, with zero compensation. Precarious working conditions are never far removed from the similarly precarious position of the black, female body. Sugar Island world-premiered in the Venice Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori section.

Johanné Gómez Terrero blends tradition and spirituality, the literal and the allegorical, in a beautifully made and deeply touching fiction feature debut. The themes of labour rights, protests against the mechanisation of the sugar industry, and decolonial thought make Sugar Island a syncretic, politically engaged work that avoids all traces of didacticism. On the contrary, the film’s gorgeous look, thanks to lensing by Alván Prado, alludes to the many layers of reality and beyond; it’s like every event, every conversation is happening on two planes at the same time – one that we see and another that we can only imagine.

Even in its first few minutes of screen time, Sugar Island positions itself as both hypnotic and grounded in equal measure. The low-key lighting bounces off dancers’ bodies as they perform in a group, the redness of their costumes standing out against the deep, dark shadows. Prado’s particularly kinetic camerawork in these scenes foreshadows the movement between realms, but the visual effect itself is almost dizzying: close-ups are never invasive, but always loving. Often in the film, when there is an absence of words, the camera’s lingering presence fills that gap.

An honest, yet mesmerising, look at the socio-political realities in a slice of the Dominican Republic’s sugar industry, Sugar Island uses a decolonial approach to intensify its fiction as well as its realism. Attending to real issues – also real bodies and the traps society sets for them – the film speaks to feelings of internalised shame and possible liberation through spirituality and ancestral wisdom.

Sugar Island was produced by Guasabara Cine (Dominican Republic) and Spanish outfit Tinglado Film. Patra Spanou Film holds the film’s international sales rights.