“An important and very promising debut from a filmmaker who still needs to shake her documentarian roots a bit, but most of all allow herself to take the time to use her considerable talent to the best effect.”

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.

The main through line in Sugar Island is the story of Makenya (Yelidá Díaz, with stoic charisma), a teenage girl and third-generation worker in the Dominican Republic’s sugarcane industry. She lives with her mother Filomena (Ruth Emeterio) and her grandfather (Juan Maria Almonte) in a batey, a shanty-town camp for sugarcane cutters. Like anyone her age, Makenya likes to have fun and party with her friends, but that fun quickly changes to fear when she turns out to be pregnant, possibly by the man who gave her a lift and a lollipop. Initial attempts to abort the child fail, and she must face the fact that she will have to carry the child to term. Finding a job that she can still do in her state and finding her way through the bureaucracy to ensure her child gets citizenship become her driving forces, but both are a struggle for a young woman in her position.

Old men have it tough too, certainly if you’re a Haitian sugarcane cutter like Makenya’s granddad. Even after decades of working the fields with his machete, he is still getting shafted by his employers, and he is not the only one. He is part of a group of workers who make their voices heard in Santo Domingo, the country’s capital, demanding pensions and better working conditions. This obviously doesn’t make him popular with his bosses, and because of his age he is forced to leave the batey with his daughter and granddaughter, something the family fights to the bitter end.

The connective tissues between these two threads are scenes of a theater troupe of which Makenya is a member, which tells the history of the sugar industry on the island, a history built on the suffering of slaves. They read out contracts about the sale of slaves, and tell the story of one of the largest slave rebellions in Dominican history, in the heart of sugarcane country. The segments are meant to underline the connection between the slaves of two centuries ago and the people treated as slaves that are currently working the plantations. This seamlessly connects to scenes with a white overseer, Leroi, perpetually on his horse looking down at the black, predominantly Haitian workers. By keeping the workers poor and ignorant, and above all through bureaucracy keeping them immigrants, white plantation owners maintain tight control over their industry in ways not unlike those of centuries ago, thereby sustaining a vicious cycle that lets generation after generation fall into the same traps. The way Gómez Terrero connects the dots here is strikingly simple but also strikingly effective. A slave rebellion at the end of the 18th century isn’t that different from workers’ protests in the 21st; the sad conclusion is that they change nothing. A moment in which Gómez Terrero gives the underprivileged a face by showing portraits of real plantation workers is therefore all the more touching.

An important part of the Haitian culture that was brought into the Dominican Republic, itself originating in the countries of West and Central Africa, is the syncretic religion of vodou, in the West spelled as voodoo (a spelling now oft disregarded because of the negative connotations it acquired as a result of Western sensationalism). This is the film’s most difficult-to-penetrate layer, the rituals and teachings completely unknown to almost anyone but its practitioners. A recurring image of a snake sliding through grass, combined with a story her granddad tells Makenya about a snake who gave a girl a magic wand with which she could accomplish anything she wanted, gives some indication of where Makenya’s story is going, but most of the vodou we see can only truly be understood by scouring Wikipedia (and even then it’s more an academic understanding than a true one).

This is probably Sugar Island‘s biggest issue: Gómez Terrero doesn’t allow herself time to go deeper into the interesting topics she raises, topics that each could fill a film of its own. This makes some of the story threads feel undercooked, which is a shame since Gómez Terrero is clearly knowledgeable and passionate about those subjects, and has the talent to visualize as well as clearly verbalize them. Sugar Island is an important and very promising debut from a filmmaker who still needs to shake her documentarian roots a bit, but most of all allow herself to take the time to use her considerable talent to the best effect.