The eighth annual Third Horizon Film Festival returns to Miami this week with four days of cutting-edge cinema and performance art from filmmakers from more than a dozen countries, including new features from French Guiana and the Dominican Republic, celebrating the breadth and depth of Caribbean storytelling. Programming will begin this Thursday at the Perez Art Museum with the Florida premiere of Haitian-Canadian director Joseph Hillel’s experimental documentary Koutékout (At All Kosts), which focuses on a group of theatre artists in Port-au-Prince, putting on their own event: the Festival Quatre Chemins, an annual celebration of Haitian performance that has endured through earthquakes, regime changes, and years of violence and changing circumstances for the nation.
The film is a mix of interviews with the artists and vignettes of their performances across poetry, theatre, and music, captured in various states of production with a loving gaze. There are occasional gunshots in the background, and tall security fences, but Hillel wanted the film to focus on magnifying the work of artists instead of repeating the same narratives about Haiti’s political crises and violence. They follow playwright Guy Regis Jr. to the Haitian Book Festival in Montreal, where an interviewer finally asks him, “Are you not normalizing a situation that is not normal?” Regis responds: “When we perform theatre in a country like Haiti, it’s an act of resistance… Can you imagine a country with nothing left? No space for reflection? If we let the gangs take up all the physical and mental space, we have no country left.”
Hillel worked on the film for almost four years, and met many of the protagonists more than a decade ago, but became especially interested in the role of the artist in Haitian society in the wake of the presidential assassination in 2021. He shared in an interview that it was an honor to bring their work to new audiences off the island, though many of them have not had the opportunity to actually view the movie themselves yet, in part due to the lack of reliable electricity on the island currently. “There is light in the film. I did not want to show the same narratives of bad news that we always hear from Haiti… there is trauma that is there, that even if you live abroad, this is always the representation of your country. There is still joy.”
It’s an appropriate film to begin this year’s festival, which looks to movies from the past as well as the present of Caribbean cinema to celebrate film as a form of resistance and archive-making in the face of white supremacy and colonial repression. Presented in collaboration with the Miami Workers Center, the retrospective series You Donʼt Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978-1985 will present four recently restored films focusing on labor, including historical documentaries Sweet Sugar Rage and Bitter Cane, as well as West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, a movie-musical which uses a mock slave ship as its stage-like setting.
Two Florida filmmakers are showing films at the festival, both of which use experimental and poetic narrative to capture the state. Colombian filmmaker Enrique Pedráza-Botero’s topical No se ve desde acá uses jarring sound and a mix of archival advertisements and footage from citizenship ceremonies with soaring videos of Miami highrises and excess to present a tableau that captures the dissonance of existing here now (playing as part of the Shorts Block A Fever Dream Waiting for the Right Builders on May 30). Shenny de Los Angeles and Amanda “iiritu” Morell’s short Hija De Florinda (Florinda’s Daughter) follows a young girl named Naomi in the Everglades, as she learns about controlled burns from her grandmother. Shot in black and white and integrating archival footage of Dominican farmer and abolitionist Mama Tingo (Florinda Soriano), the poetic tribute to ancestral land caretaking premieres as a part of the Your Hands Were Built From Memory shorts block on June 1.
Third Horizon is known for its family-like atmosphere and the social space it creates for Caribbean cinephiles around its centerpiece films, most of which will be shown at Miami-Dade College’s Koubek Center in Little Havana this weekend after the opening night at the Perez Art Museum.
SAVE THE DATE:
What: Third Horizon Film Festival Opening Night
When: Thursday, May 29, 2025
Time: 7:00 PM
Where: Perez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132
More Info: https://www.thirdhorizonfilmfestival.com/films/koutkekout-at-all-kosts/
