Third Horizon Film Festival, focusing on experimental and nonfiction cinema from the Caribbean and its diaspora, will take over the Koubek Center in Little Havana on the final weekend of May, following an opening night party at the Pérez Art Museum Miami on Thursday, May 29. The always-eclectic lineup of feature and short films from across the region, from Cuba and Puerto Rico to far-flung countries like French Guiana and Barbados, celebrates the ethnic and intellectual diversity of Caribbean cinema.
Ask the director of programming, Jonathan Ali, if there's a theme for this year's event, and he'll tell you it's a little bit theatrical. Many of the films in the lineup, which includes a retrospective section dedicated to activist cinema from the 1970s and '80s, focus on interpretations of stage performance.
"We never start curating the festival thinking about what the theme is going to be — it's always something that becomes apparent after the fact," says Ali, originally from Trinidad and Tobago. "One theme this year that's really standing out, both within the retrospective and the newer films, is theater and performance. A lot of the films have within them ideas around, or as part of their form, [things like] makeup, theatrical performance, music, or dance, as a means of political resistance; as a means of working through or coming to terms with historical trauma."
That focus is apparent in the opening film, director Joseph Hillel's Koutkekout (At All Kosts). Playing on the first night of the festival at PAMM, the documentary follows the beleaguered yet resilient artists of Port-au-Prince as they attempt to put on the annual Festival Quatre Chemins. They're faced with plenty of obstacles amid the ongoing civil disorder that has overtaken the country, with armed gangs seizing control of parts of the capital city and countryside in the wake of President Jovenel Moïse's assassination in 2021.
A still from director Génesis Valenzuela's A Freedom Struggle: Looking for Lucrecia Pérez. The film will screen at Third Horizon Film Festival 2025 later this month.
Third Horizon Film Festival photo
"I wanted to show that this group of resistance would do their art, no matter what happens," he says. "There's not much that can last 23 years in that country. I mean, presidents, prime ministers — they all pass by. But to have a festival like that open to a large part of the public, and taking place every year, for me it was a good occasion to show something else from Haiti."
Hillel says the most difficult part of the shoot wasn't necessarily security but ensuring that he and his crew, all white French Canadians, could gain the trust of his prospective subjects, who are suspicious of frequent misrepresentations of Haitian people by the media and politicians.
"It's a poor, poor place. There's all kinds of disparity between a white person, even me, and somebody who is in another reality but still very passionate, very open to others. But to make that contact that will allow me to follow, for example, an artist while he's rehearsing, to gain his confidence so I can approach him — this is the big challenge."
Other films at the festival incorporate themes of performance and artifice in interesting ways. Dominican director Génesis Valenzuela will stage a performance accompanying her documentary A Freedom Struggle: Looking for Lucrecia Pérez. The film investigates the life and death of the titular Pérez, a Dominican immigrant in Spain who was murdered by neoNazis in Madrid in 1993. Algerian director Abdenour Zahzah's biopic of Franz Fanon, meanwhile, was filmed in the actual hospital where the legendary psychologist and anti-colonial theorist worked. It also has a rather long-winded title: True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, When Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956.
The festival's closing film also centers the stage. Legendary Mauritanian-French director Med Hondo's West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, a movie musical, presents the story of the Black diaspora on a stage resembling a slave ship.
A still from director Med Hondo's West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty. The film will screen at Third Horizon Film Festival 2025 later this month.
Third Horizon Film Festival photo
That cooperative spirit animates the festival beyond the films themselves. With many participating filmmakers and audience members attending to meet like-minded cinephiles and film workers from the Caribbean and beyond, Third Horizon is also a place to network and build relationships. Panel discussions, after-hours parties, and other events make it more than just a place to see unique movies. Ali believes this in-person experience is crucial for Third Horizon and other festivals, especially for Caribbean-origin artists who often find themselves in unfriendly spaces.
"Film festivals aren't about films, really. They're about people, because we live in a day and age where you can sit at home and watch films to your heart's content," Ali says. "[Artists] always tell us after they come to the festival for the first time that they didn't know that this was missing in their life, that they needed this; that they often present their work at other prestigious festivals elsewhere that are focused primarily on the work as work, which we do, too. The work comes first. But a space where people who identify as Caribbean and diasporic people can come together: That's also important, and we believe the artists believe so as well."
Third Horizon Film Festival 2025. Thursday, May 29, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; Friday, May 30 through Sunday, June 1 at the Koubek Center, 2705 SW Third St., Miami. Individual tickets and passes are available at thirdhorizonfilmfestival.com.
