MIAMI NICE: Puncturing Myths w/ Jason Fitzroy Jeffers and Brandon Harris

Hosts Katie Walsh and Blake Howard join multi-hyphenates filmmaker-film festival director Jason Fitzroy Jeffers and studio executive-film director-critic-programmer-screenwriter-educator Brandon Harris to talk about MIAMI VICE (2006) holding an uncomfortable mirror up to the reflection of early 2000s Miami.

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ABOUT JASON FITZROY JEFFERS

Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker from Barbados 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 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, and his writing has also appeared in outlets such as American Way and Ocean Drive.

In addition to his film work, Jeffers is also the Founding Director of the Miami-based Caribbean filmmaking collective Third Horizon, which stages the annual 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 and social justice, Jeffers was named a 2019 Ford Foundation / Rockwood Leadership Institute JustFilms fellow.

Jeffers is currently in development on two feature-length projects: he is co-writing and producing Untitled Opa-locka Project, a science fiction set in inner-city Miami, which has been supported by Sundance Talent Forum, SFFILM and Cinereach; and he is also directing The First Plantation, a documentary on the fight for reparations in Barbados for which he was named a Doc Society New Perspectives fellow.

ABOUT BRANDON HARRIS

Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Brandon Harris has worked in the world of American Cinema as a studio executive and film director, critic and programmer, screenwriter and educator. Formerly a Development Executive for Amazon Studios, where he oversaw productions such as Master (2022) and The Voyeurs (2021) and acquisitions such as Blow the Man Down (2020) and Time (2020), Harris's lauded writings about cinema, politics, culture, and the intersections between them have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Guardian, VICE, The Daily Beast, Variety, N+1, The New Inquiry, Brooklyn Rail, In These Times, Hammer to Nail, and Filmmaker Magazine, where he remains a contributing editor. Harris, formerly the festival programmer at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, is the director of Redlegs (2012), a New York Times Critics Pick. His genre bending mix of memoir and history Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, released in 2017 by Amistad Books, is a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was named a Vogue Magazine book of the year.

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