Jamaica For Sale
April 17–17, 2022
7:15pm
“Honing in on the environmental and economic impacts of overdevelopment, Jamaica For Sale connects the tourism industry and its ripple effects to a long legacy of extractive industry in the Caribbean. Through her engagement with a wide range of Jamaicans—workers, environmentalists, scholars, and small business owners—Figueroa’s documentary reckons with the false promise of prosperity through tourism, in a country that remains highly dependent on it.”—Dessane Lopez Cassell
Co-presented with Metrograph Presented as part of Unraveling Paradise, curated by Dessane Lopez Cassell.
ABOUT
Esther Figueroa Ph.D, is a Jamaican independent filmmaker, writer, educator and linguist with over thirty five years of media productions including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature film. Her activist filmmaking gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and focuses on the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge and cultures, the natural environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa’s films have screened and been televised all over the world, and taught at numerous universities. They include Jamaica for Sale (2009), the award-winning feature documentary about tourism and unsustainable development. Her most recent feature documentary, Fly Me To The Moon (2019) is about modernity and the global aluminum industry. In 2020, she founded the Global Extraction Film Festival, the first online film festival focused on global extraction. In 2013, Figueroa was Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai’i English Department. Her environmental novel, Limbo (2014), was a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards for Multicultural Fiction.