Short Film · 2025

Sugar Dumplin

"A visual journal dedicated to every Black father who has committed their life to being present."

Sugar Dumplin’ follows Ebony James as she attempts to reconnect with her estranged father, Desmond — a Jamaican-born man now living in a retirement home and losing his grip on the present to dementia. Words have become unreliable. Visits have become strained. But there is one thing that still reaches him.

Food. Specifically, the food of his childhood. The recipes he grew up with in Jamaica — the smells, the textures, the tastes that live in the body long after the mind has started to let go. Ebony begins recreating those dishes one by one, bringing them to Desmond in the hope that what conversation can no longer do, a pot of rice and peas or a bowl of soup might.

What unfolds is a deeply moving portrait of a daughter’s love, a father’s fading memory, and the way Caribbean food carries identity across generations — even when everything else has slipped away. Sugar Dumplin’ is a film about estrangement and reconciliation, about dementia and dignity, and about the extraordinary power of a meal to say what we no longer have the words for.