Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker from Barbados based in Miami and San Francisco whose work focuses on giving rooted and nuanced voice to the Caribbean, pockets of subtropical Black life across the American South, and other marginalized, equatorial, Afro-diasporic spaces.
As a filmmaker, he has produced award-winning shorts such as Papa Machete, Dolfun, and Swimming in Your Skin Again that have screened at film festivals such as Sundance, BlackStar, TIFF, Sheffield and more. More recently, he co-directed the short film Drowning by Sunrise for The Intercept, and produced T, the 2020 winner of the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale. Prior to this, Jeffers was a journalist with The Miami Herald, whose writing has also appeared in outlets such as American Way and Ocean Drive.
In addition to his filmmaking, Jeffers is also co-founder, former festival director and current board chair of Third Horizon Film Festival, a showcase of cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other underrepresented spaces in the Global South. It was named one of the “25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World” in 2019 and 2021 by MovieMaker Magazine. For this and other work at the intersection of filmmaking, civic media, and social justice, Jeffers was named a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2023 USA fellow, a 2019 Ford Foundation / Rockwood Leadership Institute JustFilms fellow, and a 2023 USC Annenberg Lab fellow. More recently, Filmmaker Magazine named Jeffers one of its “25 New Faces in Independent Film” for 2024.
Jeffers is currently in development on two feature-length projects: he is co-writing and producing Arc, a social realist science fiction set in inner-city Miami, which has been supported by the Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Lab, SFFILM and Cinereach; and he is also directing The First Plantation (working title), a documentary on the fight for reparations in Barbados, which has been supported by Doc Society, JustFilms/Ford Foundation, ITVS, Sundance Institute, Field of Vision, the Threshold Fund, and the Southern Documentary Fund.