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Production
2024

The First Plantation

IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund Grantee

  • Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Director
  • Darcy McKinnon , Producer
Film still from 'The First Plantation'

About the Project

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

Project Team

    black man in brown suit and long hair over blurred background

    Jason Fitzroy Jeffers

    Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a Barbadian filmmaker whose work focuses on the Caribbean and the American South. He has produced award-winning shorts such as “Papa Machete”, as well as T, winner of the Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlinale. A former journalist who has written for South Florida publications such as the Miami Herald, he is also co-founder and former festival director of Third Horizon Film Festival, a 2023 USA Fellow, a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, and a 2024 Sundance Screenwriters Lab fellow. More recently, he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2024.

     

    black woman with glasses and her hand folded over grey background

    Darcy McKinnon

    Darcy McKinnon is a documentary filmmaker based in New Orleans, whose work focuses on the American South and the Caribbean.  Recent projects include "A King Like Me" and "Roleplay", premiering at SXSW 2024, "Commuted" (PBS, 2024), "Algiers, America" (Hulu, 2023),  "Under G-d" (Sundance 2023), "Look at Me! XXXTENTACION" (SXSW, Hulu, 2022) and "The Neutral Ground" (Tribeca, POV, 2021), recipient of LEH Documentary of the Year 2022.  Her work has been on POV, Reel South, LPB, Cinemax and Hulu, and has screened at Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, CPH:DOX and more. She is the recipient of American Documentary’s 2023 inaugural Creative Visionary Award.