English (2018)

Panama Dreams transports us on the modern-day search of the filmmaker, Alison Saunders for descendants of an ancestor who left Barbados in the early 1900s to build the Panama Canal - one of the seven wonders of the modern world. After five years of creating compelling re-enactments and collecting archival film and photos as well as contemporary images and interviews, the filmmaker tells a larger, poignant story of strength, endurance and sacrifice and uncovers troubling issues of race and oppression that faced the West Indians who worked under a Jim Crow system of discrimination on the Canal Zone and the descendants of those Canal workers in Panama, the West Indies, the US and Cuba today. The film also explores issues of race, class and power facing their descendants up to the present day.