CSIFF26 Showcases Diverse Caribbean Voices Through Six Nominated Films This October

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

The Conch Shell International Film Festival will present six Best Film nominees October 9-11, 2026, with events at Regal UA Midway in Forest Hills, Queens, and panel discussions at HB Playwright Theatre in Manhattan, according to the festival.

Conch Shell Productions operates CSIFF as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization centered on celebrating Caribbean and diaspora filmmaking, with programming that in past years has drawn on films from across Cuba, Puerto Rico, Suriname, Martinique, the UK, and Trinidad, among other places. This year’s Best Film nominees span Havana, Kingston, Brooklyn, London, and Los Angeles, tracing filmmakers who split their lives and their work between a Caribbean homeland and a diaspora city.

"I F*cking Hate You!" comes from Gabriela Paciel, who was born and raised in Havana and based the film on her relationship with her own sister, describing a bond of fighting and fierce loyalty that she’s said she’d give a kidney for, literally. Hanif James’s "A Shade Of Indigo" follows the generational weight of colorism in Jamaica, a theme James traces to his own grandmother’s advice never to marry anyone darker than himself.

Stacey Sargeant wrote, directed, and stars in "Stand Clear ‘The Closing Doors," filmed guerrilla-style on a live subway train in a six-hour shoot, drawing from an actual incident Sargeant witnessed. She’s said she made the film for Black women first, to affirm a right to take up space without apology. Juliette Jeffers’s "Pan Gyul" grew out of her one-woman stage show and, according to Jeffers, is the first professional film to tell a Nevisian story; it has already screened at Cannes and the Pan African Film Festival, where she’s said audiences unfamiliar with Nevis left wanting to visit.

Noella Letitia Mingo’s "Mummy?" is based on her cousin’s life and centers on tragedy and the strength it takes to carry on, a project Mingo has linked to feeling unheard as a Black woman of Guyanese heritage in Britain. Karen Martinez’s "Trinidad Remains" follows a British-born woman who travels to Trinidad to scatter her estranged grandmother’s ashes with her cousin, a trip upended by a stranger’s hold-up that reshapes her sense of the island and herself.

Festival founder and director Magaly Colimon-Christopher said the six films resist any single definition of Caribbean identity, touching on colorism, sisterhood, belonging, grief, and the complicated pull of home, whether the stories are set there or in the diaspora. Full schedule, screening times, and tickets are available through the festival’s website.

Studio CarryOnHarry sees the real draw here less in any one film and more in the range: six directors working in six different registers, from guerrilla subway filmmaking to Cannes-screened steel-pan drama, all competing under one Best Film banner. That’s a wider swing than most regional festivals attempt in a single category, and it’s worth watching which of these six breaks out beyond the festival circuit.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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