Film: “Sugar Island”

Many thanks to Peter Jordens for contributing this post. Here, Jordens shares excerpts of reviews of one of the films he watched at the 11th Curaçao International Film Festival, which took place during April 9-13, 2025: Sugar Island (directed by Johanné Gómez Terrero, Dominican Republic / Spain, in Spanish and Haitian, 2024).

Sugar Island, a film set in the Dominican Republic, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in Italy in September 2024. It is directed by Johanné Gómez Terrero, a Dominican filmmaker, teacher and activist.

Here are excerpts from film reviews:

“Johanné Gómez Terrero delivers a work that goes beyond conventional narrative, becoming a sensorial and political experience that shakes us to the core. […] What makes Sugar Island transcendent is its commitment to decolonial cinema that breaks with traditional structures. It is not a story told from a place of victimhood, but rather from a place of resistance, art, and memory.  Its cinematography is a visual poem that engages in dialogue with spirituality and history, illuminating Black bodies with the dignity that has so often been denied them in cinema.” —Ann Mercedes, Listín Diario, https://listindiario.com/entretenimiento/cine/20250205/critica-sugar-island-ecofeminismo-decolonial-ultima-zafra_844439.html

“Johanné Gómez Terrero cannot be denied a certain amount of ambition. Her feature debut Sugar Island is so chock-full of weighty themes, many of them important to her native Dominican Republic, that the film is almost bursting at the seams. Teen pregnancy, immigration, the reverberations of slavery, worker rights, racism; with a paltry 90-minute runtime you almost wish Gómez Terrero had given the three narratives she weaves together into a tapestry of the poorest Dominican working class more room (i.e. runtime) to breathe, as there is seemingly still much to explore in any of these subjects. That is a testament to not only the director’s history as a documentarian and the way she wants to delve into these topics and not just use them as mere plot devices, but also because they are big topics that taken together give a sobering and damning, but also well-structured look at the problems Haitian immigrants, often several generations deep, are facing. Even though the story of a young girl’s pregnancy holds it all together, it is the social angle that makes Sugar Island such a powerful portrait of a forgotten people.” —Marc van de Klashorst, International Cinephile Society, https://icsfilm.org/festivals/venice/2024-venice/venice-2024-review-sugar-island-johanne-gomez-terrero

“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.” —Savina Petkova, Cineuropa, https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/467210

Sugar Island

Social media: https://www.instagram.com/sugarislandfilm

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPWtdgE7Fbw, https://vimeo.com/1005874337

Also see https://www.stylefeelfree.com/2024/09/sugar-island-critica.html

https://www.casamerica.es/cine/sugar-island-aborda-muchos-temas-pero-termina-con-un-mensaje-esperanzador and https://elpais.com/planeta-futuro/2025-04-03/johanne-gomez-terrero-directora-dominicana-el-cine-permite-hacer-que-la-gente-mire-temas-que-no-esta-mirando.html

Follow Johanné Gómez Terrero at https://www.facebook.com/JohanneGomezTerrero and https://www.instagram.com/johannegomezterrero

Many thanks to Peter Jordens for contributing this post. Here, Jordens shares excerpts of reviews of one of the films he watched at the 11th Curaçao International Film Festival, which took place during April 9-13, 2025: Sugar Island (directed by Johanné Gómez Terrero, Dominican Republic / Spain, in Spanish and Haitian, 2024). Sugar Island, a film