Third Horizon Film Festival Returns With Radical Documentaries

It's no secret a prevailing Cuban influence thrives in Miami. But over the years, the metropolitan area long celebrated for its diversity has welcomed a growing expansion of multicultural films, music, and art beyond Cuba to include many of its Caribbean neighbors.

This steady, bold rise of Caribbean-Miami infusion is honored in the upcoming Third Horizon Film Festival. Returning for its third edition, the festival will take place Thursday, September 27, through Sunday, September 30.

Intent on shaking things up this year, the fest will offer a screening lineup of nearly all documentaries. "Given the fractured political moment we continue to find ourselves in globally, we’ve decided to foreground radical and empathetic filmmaking voices,” says Jonathan Ali, Third Horizon’s director of programming." These films, he says, "focus on the struggles of the marginalized against traditional structures of power."

That theme connects plenty of 2018’s Third Horizon features across the board. Teddy Award-winning Bixa Travesty, about the Afro-Brazilian artist and activist Linn de Quebrada, is one of the many movies to watch. Recent New York Latino Film Festival Best Documentary Voices of the Sea, with its depiction of poverty-stricken Cuban villagers escaping to the States, is also a must-see.
Making waves in the film community is Khalik Allah’s Black Mother, which will have its Florida premiere the first night of the festival at Pérez Art Museum Miami. Indie Wire describes Black Mother as offering the “immersive qualities of installation art” as it dives into the spirit of human experience through the lens of generations of Jamaicans, from priests to street prostitutes.

O Cinema Wynwood will show other notable works, such as those of a legion of up-and-coming Caribbean talents. 1950: The Nationalist Uprising investigates the effects of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Uprising on a handful of citizens' lives, and A Focus on Walter Rodney is a series of documentaries covering the late, influential Guyanese activist. Also being spotlighted will be Rodell Warner, a Trinidadian artist whose work can be seen on the festival poster, website, and flyers.

Closing off the weekend-long event will be Sprinter, Best Narrative Feature and Audience Award winner at this year’s American Black Film Festival. Boasting the direction of Storm Saulter, as well as production by Jada and Will Smith’s Overbook Entertainment, the movie paints a poignant tale of a Jamaican teen and rising track star’s goal to reunite with his mother living illegally in the U.S.

Founded by Third Horizon, a Miami-based collective of Caribbean creatives, the festival declares a stronger than ever mission to “speak truth to power,” in reaction to the “exclusion of minority communities worldwide.”

Third Horizon 2018 Caribbean Film Festival. Thursday, September 27, through Sunday, September 30, at O Cinema Wynwood, 90 NW 29th St., Miami; 305-571-9970; o-cinema.org. Tickets cost $12 to $33 via thirdhorizonfilmfestival.com.