Caribbean Cinema Arrives in South East England

How a Bold New UK Film Series Is Bringing the Caribbean to Britain’s Doorstep — and Why Travelers Should Pay Attention

A ground-breaking screening series is carrying the spirit of the Caribbean deep into south-east England, screening award-winning films from the region for the very first time.

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Picture Port of Spain at Carnival season: the throbbing bass of soca, the cascade of sequins, the intoxicating collision of history and pure joy. Now imagine those stories — raw, urgent, beautifully made — landing not in a buzzy London arts house, but in a Victorian seaside cinema perched on the English Channel. That is precisely what is happening this spring, and for anyone who cares about Caribbean culture — as a traveler, a film lover, or simply someone curious about the world — it’s a moment worth marking.

From May through June 2026, a curated screening series called Crossroads is bringing contemporary Caribbean cinema to south-east England for the first time. Running at the Electric Palace Cinema in Hastings, alongside partner venues in Lewes, Eastbourne, and Hertford, the series draws its programming directly from the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival (TTFF) — widely regarded as the world’s premier Caribbean-focused film festival. It is a cultural bridge, quietly built, between two worlds that have more to say to each other than most mainstream programming ever allows.

The Force Behind the Festival

The driving intelligence behind Crossroads is Mariel Brown — TTFF’s festival director and, fittingly, a Hastings resident herself. That detail matters. This is not a Caribbean cultural initiative parachuted in from London. It is rooted in the community it serves, organized through SAVANT Media, her Hastings-based organization, and developed in genuine partnership with local independent cinemas.

“Crossroads is about creating a space in the UK for Caribbean stories to be seen, heard, talked about, and celebrated,” Brown has said of the series. Her framing is deliberate. The word “space” carries weight here: Caribbean filmmaking has long operated at the margins of global distribution, overlooked by streaming algorithms and mainstream festival circuits that still default to the same handful of national cinemas. What Crossroads offers is something rare — intentional, expert-curated access to some of the finest work coming out of the region today.

For context, the TTFF was first conceived in 2005 by film historian and producer Dr. Bruce Paddington with a singular and radical mandate: to show only Caribbean films. The first festival launched in 2006, and in the two decades since, it has grown into the most important competitive film festival the Caribbean has. This year, TTFF celebrates its 20th anniversary — a milestone that makes the Crossroads initiative feel less like a side project and more like a statement of intent about where Caribbean storytelling is heading.

What’s Screening — and Why It Matters

The Electric Palace in Hastings is anchoring three events, each chosen with evident care. Together, they sketch a portrait of the contemporary Caribbean that is anything but monolithic.

The series opens (for families) with Big Stories for Little Ones, a half-term children’s programme assembling vibrant short Caribbean films spanning animation, fiction, and documentary. It’s a smart programming move — introducing young British audiences to Caribbean storytelling at an age when curiosity is still fully open, without gatekeeping, and before the world starts to narrow their sense of what stories look like.

The feature centrepiece is Queen of Soca, a drama from Trinidad and Tobago directed by Kevin Adams, starring soca royalty Terri Lyons — daughter of the legendary Superblue and sister of Fay-Ann Lyons. The film follows Olivia, a singer from the slums of Port of Spain whose viral track earns her a shot at “The Greatest Show on Earth” — Trinidad’s biggest soca competition — against the resistance of a deeply religious mother determined to keep her away from the music. It is a film that pulses with energy and cultural specificity, steeped in Trinidadian carnival culture in ways that most international audiences will have never encountered on screen.

Then there is Kanaval, the series closer — and perhaps its most powerful offering. A joint Canada-Luxembourg production directed by Haitian-Canadian filmmaker Henri Pardo, the film won the Best Feature-Length Fiction Film award at TTFF 2025, as well as recognition at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Through the eyes of nine-year-old Rico — uprooted from Haiti to Canada in the 1970s — the film explores diaspora, displacement, and memory with the gentleness of a child’s imagination, as Rico navigates his strange new world alongside Kana, an imaginary companion drawn from Haitian mythology. The closing screening at the Electric Palace will be followed by a live facilitated talkback led by Hastings-based facilitator Tola Dabiri — an invitation for audiences to sit with the film’s themes rather than simply walk away.

The full Crossroads series at partner venues in Lewes (Depot), Eastbourne (Towner Cinema), and Hertford (BEAM) includes additional titles, among them Possible Landscapes — a documentary co-created with academics from architecture and comparative literature that traces intergenerational relationships with the Trinidadian environment across sugarcane fields, fishing boats, and dying coral reefs. It is the kind of film that turns tourism into something deeper: an invitation to understand a place rather than merely visit it.

Why This Is Bigger Than a Film Series

For the Caribbean travel industry, cultural programming like Crossroads functions as soft power of the most effective kind. Research has consistently shown that cultural engagement — film, music, literature — is one of the most influential triggers for destination interest, particularly among younger, experience-driven travelers. When a British audience in Hastings watches a soca singer fight her way out of Port of Spain, or a Haitian child navigate Toronto homesickness through mythology, something shifts. The Caribbean stops being an abstraction of beach and rum and becomes somewhere with a story worth following — somewhere worth going.

That connection has real economic implications. The creative industries of the Caribbean, still dramatically undervalued globally, have enormous untapped potential to drive cultural tourism. Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival alone draws tens of thousands of international visitors annually, and the island’s film culture — nurtured partly through TTFF’s competitive framework — is one of its most authentic calling cards. Visibility in UK markets, where a significant Caribbean diaspora community also lives, expands that reach in meaningful ways.

Julia Andrews-Clifford, co-director of Electric Palace Cinema, put it plainly: “We are delighted to be working with the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival to screen so many incredible Caribbean films for our Hastings audience. It’s a great privilege and we’re excited to be part of it.”

The Deliberate Choice to Go Beyond London

One of the most quietly radical aspects of Crossroads is where it isn’t. It is not in Brixton. It is not at BFI Southbank. The series has been built through independent cinemas in Hastings, Lewes, Eastbourne, and Hertford — towns and cities whose audiences rarely get prioritized in programming decisions about global, diaspora, or non-English-language cinema.

The British Blacklist, which covers Black British screen culture, noted the significance of this directly: “Caribbean stories are not just supplementary programming for multicultural London; our stories must be told everywhere.” That ethos, embedded in the geography of Crossroads itself, makes the series genuinely subversive in the best possible way.

It also makes it a compelling proposition for travelers. Hastings is one of England’s most characterful coastal towns — a medieval Old Town fisherman’s quarter, a dramatically perched castle ruin, miles of pebble beach and net shops, and a thriving arts and independent culture scene that punches well above its size. The Electric Palace is its much-loved independent cinema, and catching a Caribbean film there, in that setting, with a facilitated talkback afterward, offers the kind of specific, rooted cultural experience that distinguishes a meaningful trip from a forgettable one.

With TTFF marking its 20th anniversary in 2026, and Crossroads now establishing a foothold for Caribbean cinema in the UK beyond the capital, there is every reason to expect this initiative to grow. Festival director Mariel Brown has spoken about the upcoming milestone as an opportunity to honour filmmakers whose careers have been shaped by TTFF while continuing to champion new voices — and Crossroads, with its outward-facing ambition, feels like the natural extension of that philosophy.

For travelers, the invitation is straightforward: the Caribbean has always offered extraordinary natural beauty and irresistible warmth. What Crossroads makes visible is the depth of the storytelling culture behind that beauty — the artists, the myths, the music, the grief, the ambition. These are films that will send you looking for flights.

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