Mayworks Festival: Sugar Island (2024) Screening + Discussion

Sugar Island immerses us in the Dominican Republic’s sugarcane fields, where Makenya, a Dominican-Haitian teenager, navigates an unexpected pregnancy and the harsh labor that defines her world.

The screening will be followed by a discussion focussing on the history of the island nation’s sugar plantations, the evolution from slave labour to the Batey system, and current labour organizing within this exploitative sector. It will also delve into the director’s artistic approach.

This venue is wheelchair accessible and has gender neutral, wheelchair accessible washrooms. For requests, please email [email protected]

Mayworks Festival is a community-based festival which annually presents new works by a diverse and broad range of artists, who are both workers and activists. The programming presents bold, insightful, responses to pressing issues at the intersection of art, social justice and labour. .

The Caribbean Solidarity Network (CSN) is an organization committed to the principles of Caribbean Liberation and Unity across the region as well as throughout the Diaspora. CSN’s platform is one rooted in a feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial struggle. The history of the Caribbean peoples has always been one of freedom and self-determination. CSN offers space for the Caribbean community and invested allies to foment ideas and build collective knowledge and understanding about present and local circumstances. Learn More.

The University of Toronto New College's Community Engaged Learning is a placement-based program for students to work in social service or community sector.

Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto is an interdisciplinary program engaging Caribbean history and society, politics and economic development, literature and thought.

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Host or Publisher Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts