What do adult children do when they return home—not just to care for a sick parent, but to face the emotional weight of everything left unsaid?

The Weight of Sugar Cane is a short film about four siblings—Karina, Joel, Ethan and Janelis—who reunite to care for their immigrant father after a diagnosis. What begins as a logistical week of caregiving becomes a journey through buried family roles, quiet grief, and the hard work of reconnecting.

Set in an old New York neighborhood full of memories, bodegas, and fire escapes, this story weaves together emotional depth, cultural nuance, and moments of play that remind us who we used to be—and who we might still become.

We’re raising just under $20,000 to bring this story to life with an all Caribbean cast and crew. This is a film hecho con corazón—for our people, by our people—because we know the richness of our stories and the beauty of telling them ourselves. Every dollar goes toward paying our cast and crew fairly, securing authentic locations, and making this a beautiful, moving film that reflects the lived experiences of so many adult children of immigrants.

What We’re Making

This is a story about:

• The invisible labor of adult children
• Generational trauma and unspoken love
• Caregiving as a complicated act of healing
• Siblings rediscovering “play” in a world that taught them to carry weight

Think The Meyerowitz Stories meets The Farewell—but set in an immigrant household in the Bronx, with a rhythm and voice all its own.

Why It Matters ?

Too many stories about illness focus only on the patient. This one centers the caregivers—the adult children trying to manage aging parents, broken communication patterns, and childhood roles they thought they’d outgrown. And we’re telling it from a distinctly Caribbean lens, with cultural nuance, spiritual undertones, and music that sounds like memory.

We want to tell a story that’s culturally specific and emotionally universal. This is a story about real love, real tension, and the moments of play that help us survive it all.

Where Your Support Goes:

• Paying our cast and crew fairly
• Securing authentic NYC locations
• Creating a visual and sonic world rooted in Caribbean/Dominican culture
• Delivering a high-quality short film designed for festival and community release

Cultural ROI...what you’re really investing in ?

By supporting this project, you’re investing in a film led by a Dominican filmmaker, written by a Puerto Rican storyteller, and brought to life by an all Caribbean cast and crew. This is a story that resists the industry’s tendency to flatten or stereotype our communities—instead, it centers second-generation Dominican-American characters in all their complexity. It’s a creative space shaped by care, craft, and cultural truth—a story that holds nuestra gente, our grief, and our joy with the dignity and depth they deserve.

The mood of The Weight of Sugar Cane is rooted in nostalgia—warm, textured, and intimate. While the film embraces natural and low light with rich shadows, it isn’t meant to feel overly moody or heavy. This is not just a story about grief, but an ambiguous grief; about rediscovery—about adult siblings finding themselves again in the spaces where they once belonged. There’s a quiet yearning beneath it all, a sense of searching for something lost in the weight of responsibility. And in the midst of life’s struggles, there are moments of levity, of play, of laughter that remind them of who they once were. It’s a film that lingers in the in-between, capturing the beauty of reconnection in a world that has, for too long, felt like all work and no play.