Director | 2026
The stunning Caribbean island of Barbados is the birthplace of many things: rum, Rihanna, and sadly, the world's first plantation-based economy, from which key laws and social frameworks around plantation life spawned across the Caribbean and the United States, paving the way for so many aspects of systemic racism which still haunt the Americas to this day.
With Barbados having recently become a republic, its government has embarked upon a reparations campaign. Its first target? Drax Hall, one of the most influential plantations in the western hemisphere, owned by the same family for nearly 400 years. Its current owner is MP Richard Drax, the wealthiest landowner in the UK House of Commons. With this, debate has sprung up on both sides of the Atlantic: should the Drax family still be allowed to profit from this historic property, or should it be handed over to the people of Barbados, who are wrestling with nationwide systemic deficiencies wrought by colonialism and the looming threat of climate change?
Directed by Barbadian filmmaker Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, The First Plantation is a spiritual and deeply personal investigation into the haunted legacy of the 13th smallest country in the world, its oversized impact on modern history, and how its undeniable claim for reparations.