CSIFF26’s Shortlist: How Six Filmmakers Are Pushing Caribbean Cinema Beyond Borders

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Six Best Film nominees at the Conch Shell International Film Festival span multiple locations across the Caribbean and diaspora—Havana and Los Angeles, Kingston and Brooklyn, Georgetown and London. CSIFF takes place October 9–11, 2026, with screenings at Regal UA Midway in Forest Hills and discussion panels at HB Playwright Theatre in Manhattan, per festival details.

This year’s slate is part of a larger official selection of 47 films from 14 countries and territories, per festival materials, with the six Best Film nominees standing in for the breadth of that lineup. Conch Shell is a program of Conch Shell Productions, Inc., a Queens-based nonprofit built around the idea that Caribbean and diaspora film can serve as a tool for social change.

The slate encompasses both narratives rooted in the Caribbean and stories told from diaspora communities, and the directors’ own accounts of their work point in different directions. Gabriela Paciel, born and raised in Havana and now based in Los Angeles, built "I F*cking Hate You!" out of her relationship with her sister. Paciel reflected that she has long said "I will give her a kidney," emphasizing the depth of familial commitment. "I hope she doesn’t need it ever, but I will give her a kidney. And I know she will do the same."

Hanif James’s "A Shade Of Indigo," set in Jamaica, follows a girl raised on the message that "anything Black not good" — a phrase James describes as common there — and traces it back to his own grandmother’s advice never to marry anyone darker than himself.

Sargeant’s multi-hyphenate effort "Stand Clear ‘The Closing Doors" was inspired by a subway encounter and filmed guerrilla-style over six hours on an operational train. "I made this film for Black women first and foremost," Sargeant said, "to feel seen and also to let us know that we have a right to take up space unapologetically in this world."

Juliette Jeffers, who grew up in the Bronx fascinated by the steel pan drum, turned a one-woman stage show into "Pan Gyul," which she describes as the first professional film to tell a Nevisian story. The film has screened at Cannes and the Pan African Film Festival, where Jeffers says audiences unfamiliar with Nevis left wanting to visit the island themselves.

Noella Letitia Mingo’s "Mummy?," based on her cousin’s story, centers on a tragedy that reshapes a woman’s life and the strength it takes to carry on. "As a Black woman who lives in Britain, who’s of Guyanese heritage, I didn’t feel I was being heard at all," Mingo said. "That’s why I started making films."

And in Karen Martinez’s "Trinidad Remains," a British-born woman named Nikki travels reluctantly to Trinidad to scatter her estranged grandmother’s ashes, joined by her cousin Jade and an unreliable old car — a trip upended by a stranger’s hold-up that ends up changing how Nikki understands both the island and herself.

"What excites me about these six films is that there is no single way they are telling us what it means to be Caribbean," said Magaly Colimon-Christopher, the festival’s founder and director, in the announcement. "These filmmakers are talking about colorism, sisterhood, belonging, Black women taking up space, grief, family, and the complicated relationship we can have with the places we come from."

Full schedule and ticket information are posted at conchshelliff.com.

For Studio CarryOnHarry, what stands out here isn’t the geography so much as the range packed into six films — colorism, subway encounters, steel pan history, inherited grief — proof that a festival built around one region doesn’t have to tell one kind of story.

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

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