Johanné Gómez Terrero's 'Sugar Island' Exposes Colonial Legacies Between Haiti and Dominican Republic

Afro-Dominican filmmaker Johanné Gómez Terrero's hybrid documentary-fiction film 'Sugar Island' (2024) follows Makenya, a Dominican-Haitian teenager living in a batey (sugarcane plantation community) whose pregnancy triggers a spiritual and social awakening. The film exposes anti-Haitian violence and structural racism without didacticism, depicting community care and ancestral spirituality as forms of resistance. Shot in the ruins of the Boca de Nigua sugar mill—site of a slave rebellion led by Ana María—the narrative incorporates critical fabulation, a concept by Saidiya Hartman, to tell erased stories. Makenya, played by Dominican actress Yelidá Díaz, navigates undocumented status, lack of sex education, and criminalized abortion while supported by her mother, grandfather, and best friend. The film features activists and sugarcane workers protesting for pensions. Spiritual elements include the Vodou deity Saint Marta Lubaná and the syncretic Gagá festival. Gómez Terrero, a professor and activist, developed the work from a documentary into a multilayered narrative that disrupts linear time, using letters from colonial archives and performances of marronage. The film premiered at the International Film and Television School (EICTV) in Cuba.