Jason Fitzroy Jeffers

Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker from Barbados whose work focuses on giving rooted and nuanced voice to the Caribbean and the wider Third World. 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 Drowning by Sunrise for The Intercept, and produced T, the 2020 winner of the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale. Jeffers is co-founder, former festival director, and current board chair of Third Horizon Film Festival, which centers cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other underrepresented spaces in the Global South. Prior to his work in film, Jeffers was a journalist with The Miami Herald and various media outlets across South Florida. He is 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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