Caribbean Beat — September/October 2017 (#147)

From Papa Machete
After an internship with Rolling Stone magazine
— quite a coup, given he was still in his first year
at university — and a brief stint as a freelancer,
Jeffers got a job as a reporter for The Sun Post,
a weekly newspaper covering Miami Beach. “I
wasn’t there very long, but through that job, I
became a great observer of life,” Jeffers notes.
“It was very difficult. I didn’t enjoy it, but it’s one
of the best things that ever happened to me. It
made me comfortable speaking to anyone. It gave
muscles to my curiosity, and so many ideas based
on events and characters I met — so many stories
to tell.” He shakes his head and laughs, distracted
for a moment by fleeting memories.
Jeffers’s interest in filmmaking began when, age
twelve, he received a book about Alfred Hitchcock.
“I was fascinated by film, and from that time it was
the only thing I really wanted to do,” he recalls.
“I was always into music, writing, telling stories.
Filmmaking is just an extension of that expression.”
It was at a turning point in his life — five years after graduating from FIU,
freshly laid off from his newspaper job, and about to return to Barbados — that
Jeffers’s first love reasserted its presence. “I came across a cell phone video of
the Professor fencing” — that’s Alfred Avril, one of the last practitioners of the
tradiaitonal Haitian martial art of machete fencing — “and I knew immediately I had
to make the movie. Given the importance of the Haitian Revolution to Caribbean
and world history, I realised this story needed to be told and that my company, Third
Horizon” — originally a small record label created to produce his music — “needed
to be resurrected so I could tell it. I put every dollar into the venture. Everyone on
the team contributed. I sold my furniture, maxed out my credit cards. My anxiety
“There’s a certain audacity that Caribbean
people have,” says Jeffers. “It’s an instinct.
We needed it to survive what we came
through historically”
was . . .” He raises his left hand above his head to indicate how high.
“I remember thinking, many times, ‘This is the stupidest thing you’ve
ever done. This is ridiculous.’ But that didn’t stop me. It was at once the most
important and yet the most foolish thing I’d ever done. A nothing ventured,
nothing gained kind of situation.”
Despite doubts, Jeffers persevered. “That is one of my character traits, to
aim big. To just do what I have to do to get where I want to be. I think that
comes from my upbringing — some nurture, some nature,” he adds with
a chuckle. “There’s a certain audacity that Caribbean people have. It’s an
instinct. We needed it to survive what we came through historically.”
The result was Papa Machete, a ten-minute documentary about Avril. After
the film was made came the difficult task of finding ways to promote it. So
Jeffers set his sights on international film festivals.
42 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM