Jason Fitzroy Jeffers

Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker and cultural instigator from Barbados whose work explores the clandestine Caribbean and subtropical arcana across the western hemisphere. He has written and produced award-winning shorts such as "Papa Machete" that have screened at film festivals such as Sundance Film Festival, BlackStar, TIFF, and more. More recently, he co-directed the short film "Drowning by Sunrise" for The Intercept, and produced "T", the 2020 winner of the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale. Prior to his work in film, Jeffers was a journalist with The Miami Herald and various media outlets across South Florida.In addition to his filmmaking, Jeffers is co-founder and former festival director of Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami, a showcase of cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other underrepresented spaces in the Global South. It was named one of the “25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World” in 2019 and 2021 by MovieMaker Magazine.For his work at the intersection of filmmaker advocacy, community building, and social justice, Jeffers was named a 2019 Ford Foundation / Rockwood Leadership Institute JustFilms Fellow and a 2022 USC Annenberg Civic Media Fellow. For his filmmaking work, he was named a 2023 USA Fellow, a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2024 Sundance Screenwriters Lab fellow, and was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2024.

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ABOUT The First Plantation (working title)

A documentary on reparations becomes unexpectedly personal when a filmmaker returns home to Barbados to tell the story of Drax Hall, the oldest continuously owned and operated sugar plantation in the Americas, recently inherited by a wealthy British politician descended from the slave master who founded it.

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