WICFF 2026: Regenerations

Six shorts from a new generation of Caribbean and diaspora filmmakers, screening in Port of Spain. WINDRUSH – A NEW GENERATION What makes somewhere feel like home? How much of our identity comes from the cultures we inherit, and how much do we choose? And who gets to decide which people belong? The Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival presents six short films by a new generation of filmmakers working across Britain, Jamaica, Guyana, Costa Rica and the wider Caribbean diaspora — in drama, satire, documentary and deeply personal storytelling. Total running time: approximately 95 minutes. Prices in poster quoted at TTD THE BORDER CZAR Directed by Raymond T. Williams Costa Rica, 2025 · 11 min 55 sec After delivering a speech on immigration, Rep. Jim Coolidge returns home and goes to sleep, only to wake up on the other side of the border. Disoriented and unable to wake, he is forced forward through an unfamiliar landscape, where the distance between what he believes andwhat he faces begins to close. BREATH OF ANOTHER Directed by Sheridan Seraphin United Kingdom, 2024 · 13 min 35 sec A psychedelic short about a young man moving through the routines of a toxic workplace, worn down by low self-esteem, until a new colleague becomes the catalyst for something different. Seraphin is a North London filmmaker who favours striking visual and aural technique over dialogue; the film stars Georgia-Mae Myers and Elliot Samuels. It widens the programme's idea of belonging beyond race or nationality — sometimes belonging is a question of whether you feel you deserve to occupy the room you are already standing in. SAUSAGE ROLLS & JOLLOF RICE Directed by Benjamin Turner United Kingdom, 2025 · 18 min 33 sec On a chaotic London film set, a rising Black actor, a frustrated sound technician and an ambitious young director find professional tensions turning personal. At the centre of it is something apparently trivial: a catering table holding sausage rolls and jollof rice. The food becomes a stand-in for much larger arguments about race, class, authenticity and representation, in a darkly comic meta-film where the boundary between the production being shot and the reality behind the camera starts to dissolve. Its question is an uncomfortable one for the creative industries: when organisations celebrate diversity, who actually controls the story? ACKEE AND SALTFISH Directed by Jasmin Nunes United Kingdom, 2025 · 15 min 58 sec For Hilda, a Jamaican mother living in London with her sons, preserving Caribbean identity begins at the dining table. She prepares a traditional meal, hoping to reconnect them to a culture she fears is slipping away as they settle into English life. The smell, the preparation and the meaning of the dish become a language one generation uses to speak to the next. The film captures a tension familiar to migrant families everywhere: parents cross borders so their children can have what they could not, and those same opportunities carry the next generation further from the place they came from. The film had its world premiere at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival. MY DAD, GUYANA AND ME Directed by Noella Letitia Mingo United Kingdom / Guyana, 2025 · 9 min 15 sec After losing her father, the filmmaker sets out to understand the Guyanese heritage that formed so much of who he was, and therefore part of who she is. What begins as curiosity becomes something more emotional — a poetic journey between fragmented memory and present-day discovery, built from family photographs, archival material and contemporary images of Guyana. Can a place you did not grow up in still belong to you? And when the person who carried that connection dies, what happens to the history they were holding? UGLY. AFRO HAIR Directed by Chinwe Kalu Uma United Kingdom, 2025 · 25 min 43 sec Set in a near-future where altering natural Black hair has been made illegal, the film follows a woman required to attend a government-mandated recovery programme called Natural Hair Anonymous. The premise inverts a long history: Black women have faced enormous pressure to alter Afro-textured hair to meet Eurocentric standards. Rather than simply imagining a future that celebrates natural hair, the film asks what happens when one compulsory standard is swapped for another. The question underneath the satire is not whether Black women should wear their hair naturally. It is who has the authority to decide. The programme closes by opening the widest question of all: who gets to decide which people belong, what they should look like and how they should feel about it. WHY THESE SIX FILMS TOGETHER None of them gives the same answer. One looks at representation and the creative industries. One at self-worth inside a workplace. One at beauty, autonomy and the politics of Black identity. One at migration, motherhood and inheritance. One at family memory and heritage. One at borders and the power to draw them. The scale narrows and then widens again — from institutions to bodies to kitchens to families to nations. Each asks a version of the same question: who gets to define who we are? Presented by the Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival in partnership with Tesfaya Media Flying Galvanize and Kaiso Blues Café. WICFF brings together stories of migration, identity, resistance, belonging and transformation from across the Caribbean, Africa and the global diaspora.