Filmmakers I Know Whose Movies I Can't Find

A few years ago, I was at a gathering — the kind where people from the Caribbean diaspora find themselves in the same room, lots of good food, and conversations of who-knows-who, in a city that was not designed with any of us in mind. Someone mentioned a film. "Have you seen so-and-so?" The title moved around the room the way titles do when people are excited: have you seen it, you have to see it, where did you see it, I think someone told me it was on blah, blah, blah. Then, the sentence always ended the same way. I think it was at a festival. I'm not sure if it's available anywhere.

That sentence. That particular trailing off. That's acceptance of what feels like the norm. I have heard it more times than I can count, and each time it lands the same way — not quite frustration, not quite resignation. Something in between. Reluctant acceptance. The specific feeling of something existing and being unreachable.

Surfer Woman as Filmmaker

Maharaki is a filmmaker from Martinique. I met her around 2011 or 2012 when I worked briefly for Caribbean Export, a Caribbean trade promotion project. I even visited her and did some promotion work. She is a very calm and considerate person. She trained in Paris, shot her short film Vivre on her own terms, and watched it travel to fifty festivals in its first year, winning eleven prizes — including the Grand Jury Prize at the Bahamas International Film Festival. Her 2018 documentary Jocelyne, mi tchè mwen — a portrait of Jocelyne Béroard, the voice of Kassav', the band that arguably invented zouk and gave the French Caribbean a sound the world eventually borrowed — screened at ADIFF New York, at MoAD San Francisco, at CaribbeanTales. It is ninety minutes of something you would call essential if you grew up between the islands and the diaspora cities and came of age with Kassav' playing from someone's window.

I have tried, more than once, to send someone a link to her work. I have gone through the usual sequence: search the title, check Netflix, check Amazon Prime, check Mubi, check YouTube, check Vimeo, check the filmmaker's website. Sometimes I find a trailer like the one above. Sometimes a festival archive page with no playback, like from her website link above. Sometimes nothing. The film exists. I know it exists. I have seen evidence of it. It's a really sweet story. I have spoken with her when she was making it, and yet by the standards of the platforms that most people use to watch films, it might as well not. See her IMDb here.

Ah An-tea-gah Me Come From

Howard Allen made The Sweetest Mango in 2001 with Mitzi Allen, his wife. It is Antigua's first feature film — a romantic comedy about a diaspora woman returning home, shot on the island, with an Antiguan cast and an Antiguan story. I am from Antigua. I know people who were there when it was made, who remember the shoot, who can tell you exactly where certain scenes were filmed and what the weather was like that week.

I don't personally know Howard and Mitzi, although who knows. I was in communication with Mitzi a few months ago and asked her if she was related to my father's Aunt, since her name (and the children) was Allen. Antigua and Barbuda is small, and many people are related and don't know it.

A film like that should be the kind of thing you can pull up at a family gathering, put on for your children of Antiguan parentage, anywhere in the world, or show to a friend visiting from abroad who wants to know something real about where you are from. You should be able to text someone a link. It's a cool romance story and a wonderful illustration of one way in which Antiguans love. That this is not possible is not a statement about the quality of the work. It is a statement about which stories the infrastructure was built to carry, and which it was not.

Ah So Arwe Always Do Um!

The infrastructure question is not romantic or abstract. It is mechanical. A film reaches audiences through a distribution pipeline — sales agents, streaming deals, licensing agreements, platform relationships — and that pipeline was built by and for a particular kind of film, in a particular language, aimed at a particular imagined viewer. Films made in Martinican Creole, or on a budget assembled from grants and goodwill, or about communities that the major platforms have historically treated as niche rather than core, move through that pipeline slowly, awkwardly, or not at all. They play it safe and cater to the mainstream.

I don't believe it's a conspiracy. Nobody decided that Caribbean films shouldn't be findable. It is something simpler yet more durable than a decision. It is a default. And defaults are harder to change than decisions, because they don't require anyone to be wrong. You have heard the common pushback before: "We always did it this way, so why change?"

I am not going to pretend I have a clean answer to this. I have a project that is trying to be part of one — a platform being built specifically to carry exactly these films to exactly the audiences that need them. But that is a different essay. What I want to say here is simpler.

Maharaki is still making films and art. Howard Allen made Antigua's first feature. Gloria Carrión Fonseca made Heiress of the Wind in Nicaragua and screened it at eighty festivals before going into exile in Costa Rica, where she continues to work. I met Gloria when we were both diplomats in Geneva from 2004. Then, she represented Nicaragua, and I the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Mission in Geneva. How both our lives have changed since then. These are not obscure figures producing obscure work. They have credentials, audiences, critical recognition. They are simply not findable by the methods most people use to find films.

If you know of a way to reach their work, find it. If you know someone from Martinique, or Antigua, or anywhere in the Caribbean diaspora who hasn't seen the films made about and by the people from their own place, send them this article. Not as a solution, but as a reminder that the films exist, that the filmmakers are real, and that the gap between existing and being found is not the same thing as not existing.

It just feels that way sometimes.