On May 18, 2026, Pan Gyul, Juliette Jeffers’ directorial debut culminating at Nevis’ annual Culturama festival, won two awards at the Diversity in Cannes short film showcase.
On May 31, 2026, Nevis made history with the first Caribbean Space Life Sciences experiment launched into space.
On June 22, 2026, Nevis Film Commission will commemorate its first year establishing Nevis as a prime filming destination and cultivating a robust ecosystem for local Nevisians.
MELODY HEALS THE SOUL (MHTS), our forthcoming project, with writer/producer Louric Rankine is the common ground for these milestones. Every summer, Nevis comes alive with Culturama. Masqueraders and clowns play African drums transported from the continent long ago and this year, those same rhythms are the foundation for our film exploring a question both ancient and increasingly scientific…
Can music help us heal?
Rankine’s Columbia MFA thesis project is the story of a Nevisian trumpeter in aphasia recovery from a tragic car accident leaving him speechless and burdened with survivor’s remorse. A tenacious medical student works to make Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) more culturally relevant by experimentally fusing speech therapy rhythms with soca. Against the backdrop of Culturama, the pair eventually learn how much healing is, in fact, homegrown.
When Rankine found me, a fellow Brooklyn-born filmmaker with shared roots in St. Kitts & Nevis (we’re actually born in the same hospital, Brookdale!), and pitched this love story inspired by his aunt and uncle’s coupling, I could not stop thinking about it. Not only had I directed diasporic drum and dance on screen on the path to RHYTHM IN BLUES, but I was knee-deep in brain science having recently partnered with the Zuckerman Institute for my Writers Guild of America East-workshopped feature script, BRAINWASH. However, long before I ventured to explore the neuroscience behind music and healing, I had experienced it as an African dancer who’d performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), on stages from Washington, DC, to Andover, MA, and on West Philly’s Penn campus at the height of Neosoul.
Rankine and my partnership positioned me to marry the scientific breakthroughs being advanced in our tiny island, the smallest independent nation in the West, with diasporic rhythms connecting communities across oceans and generations, for a cinematic counter-narrative that defies the odds. By uplifting Black women scientists in the Global South without divorcing them from the island rhythms and Africanness of Nevis carnival, MELODY HEALS THE SOUL won grant subsidy from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Nevis is now home to a number of cultural firsts: not only the birthplace of Hamilton whose life story is the first musical using hip-hop on Broadway, but now also MHTS, being the first short film shot in the Caribbean with support from Sloan for advancing public understanding of science.
At this convergence of Black Music, Caribbean Heritage, and Mental Health Awareness Months, I am reminded of how often healing is discussed in isolation from culture, despite the fact that culture is usually where healing begins. I have long believed that communities, especially those stigmatized or disenfranchised, when fortified by a strong sense of belonging and identity, can solve their own problems. Storytelling functions as this all-important pathway between trauma and health. West African griots and Indigenous storykeepers set us Black and brown storytellers of today up for success, having traditionally used narratives and musicianship to promote communal and intergenerational healing. While serving as a Park Ranger at lower Manhattan’s African Burial Ground, the only place where African diasporic Manhattanites could legally practice their culture, we often cited memoirs from seventeenth and eighteenth-century priests at Trinity Church documenting the healing power of the drums echoing from the nearby 6.6 acre cemetery.
We are grateful for our Caribbean diasporic creative team representing St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Venezuela, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, and Dominica, each bringing their personal experiences of carnival and homegrown healing to our motion picture. Because music, memory, and mental health are both scientifically and culturally linked, this film is every bit of a collective endeavor with partners including Nevis Film Commission, local Nevis cast, crew, and businesses. We are thrilled to grow our family of collaborators for this forward-thinking story shot on-location in our mothers’ homeland and driven by themes as old as time. Check out our Seed & Spark campaign below for ways to support.
Earth and her inhabitants, in 2026, undeniably need healing. As environmentalists increasingly turn to Indigenous communities to rediscover best practices for healing the planet, everything old is seemingly new again. The salving partner-dances to booming soca rhythms with my dad as a girl in our East New York basement made way for my immersion into the scholarship of African diasporic rhythms that heal mind, body, and spirit as an undergraduate majoring in Communications and Afro-American Studies while steeped in African drum and dance. Today we are so excited for MELODY HEALS THE SOUL as it sits at the precipice of discovery and de facto, posterity and ancestry. Campaigning for a short film in this economy is a tall ask, but we believe in its capacity to help revitalize an economy of marginalized communities’ innateness to “lock in” and listen out. A chorus of interdisciplinary activations that turn trauma into triumph is growing louder and it’s soudin’ sweet…
Just like Nevis.
