Sugar Island (2024) follows Makenya, a Dominican-Haitian teenager from a sugarcane plantation community, as an unwanted pregnancy thrusts her into adulthood and a confrontation with her family's legacy of labor exploitation and cultural displacement. The film blends Makenya’s personal struggle with Afro-Dominican spirituality, ancestral wisdom, and the decolonial performances of a theater troupe, revealing both the historical and ongoing injustices of the Caribbean sugar industry.
The film weaves together multiple themes, including: gender and identity, racial and social inequality, labor exploitation / human rights, colonial and postcolonial dependency, migration and displacement, Afro-Dominican spirituality, family and intergenerational trauma. Through these rich layers, it portrays a range of entangled dependencies: economic, racial, gendered, familial, and spiritual — rooted in the colonial past but persisting in the present.