Curator Jonathan Ali on the Cutting Edge of Caribbean Cinema

You are right that there are connections between Third Horizon and the Third World, the concept of Third Cinema, and the idea of the Caribbean being this third space. Third Horizon is inspired by an idea of the Caribbean as—as C. L. R. James once put it—the first place where you had this unintended experiment of bringing different groups of people from all over the world together and forging the first modern capitalist society, a slave plantation society with migrant labor. This is something that, of course, we as Caribbean people are keenly aware of, and it feeds the way Third Horizon approaches what we do and the way we foreground the Caribbean as not only the place where we come from but also a way of thinking about the world.

The selections for the Criterion lineup have some shared themes—the archive, slavery, freedom, history, ritual—and there’s also a lot of resonance among them in terms of formal experimentation and the question of difference. What was your approach to curating this series?

There were a number of different factors that went into choosing the films for Criterion. The underlying ethos is one that I alluded to earlier when I mentioned our conception of the Caribbean as a crucible of the world, this place where so many cultures have come together, merged, synchronized, and produced another culture, one that has many facets and strands. It can’t be reduced to any one particular idea. We went into curating this lineup knowing that we wanted it to reflect the festival’s programming in general. And the festival has always had to recognize the fact that the Caribbean is not just a particular region—it’s not only the English-speaking Caribbean. We’ve always programmed cinema from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, from the Dutch- and the French-speaking islands, and from Haiti.

 

We’ve also always been aware of the various diasporas that have come out of the Caribbean. So what we program is not only work that comes from the region, but work from the diverse Caribbean diaspora, largely in the global north, and also from diasporas descended from Africa, India, and elsewhere.

 

We embrace artists who are working on the frontiers of formal experimentation, as well as those making films that are politically aware. Form is politics—the two are inseparable for us. While representation is important, representation for its own sake is not something that we’re interested in. Representation is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

A lot of the films play with what it means to represent or how one can represent. Last night I watched Paroles de nègres [Sylvaine Dampierre, 2021], a documentary in which the workers at a sugarcane mill read transcripts from an 1842 court case, calling into question how the past lives in the present. Could you pick up from what you just said and tell us a bit more about what the political import of a film can be?

So much of what has been given to us as cinema in the past, and what continues to exist in a capitalist-driven mode of production, can be quite toxic. The idea of making cinema for yourself began with replicating these imperialist modes of seeing, a certain kind of gaze. When you’re talking about traditionally marginalized or peripheral subjects getting the ability to tell their own story, it is a question of resources and economics. When you don’t have the resources that dominant cinema industries have, do you attempt to replicate their forms with inadequate resources, or do you seek something new?

 

This is what the Caribbean can offer: a new way of seeing the world and new modes with which to relate experiences. So much of the cinema that we privilege is what you might call a “fugitive cinema” that runs from traditional, often harmful ways of representing Caribbean experience and Caribbean reality.