Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker from Barbados who has written and produced award-winning shorts such as Papa Machete that have screened at film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival, BlackStar, Toronto International Film Festival, and more. More recently, he co-directed the short film Drowning by Sunrise for The Intercept and produced the film T, a 2020 winner of the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale.
Jeffers is co-founder, former festival director, and current board chair of the Third Horizon Film Festival, an annual gathering in Miami that centers cinema from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Prior to his work in film, Jeffers was a journalist with the Miami Herald and various media outlets across South Florida. He is a 2023 USA Fellow, a 2024 Creative Capital Award recipient, and a 2024 Sundance Screenwriters Lab fellow. He is currently working on his first feature-length documentary, tentatively entitled The First Plantation, about the intensifying fight for reparations in Barbados, once home to the world’s first slavery-based economy, and the impact of this little-known history on the wider Americas.
