The Bahamas

Maria Govan is a self-taught filmmaker from New Providence in the Bahamas. After working on sets in Hollywood she returned home and began making small guerilla-style local documentaries. Her first film, Junkanoo: The Heartbeat of a People, celebrates the spiritual and creative life force of Bahamian culture by exploring the African rooted festival-tradition of Junkanoo. Her subsequent work, Where I’m From: HIV and AIDS in the Bahamas, was an official selection at the Bahamas International Film Festival. In 2004, she moved to New York and began writing her first narrative film, Rain, which premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival and won numerous awards internationally, including Best Female Feature Director in Woodstock and Jury Award for Best Feature Film in Philadelphia, to name a few. Maria’s second feature Play the Devil was selected for the Caribbean Spotlight at Ventana Sur in Buenos Aires, and also Primera Mirada at IFFP (Panama). Play the Devil premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June 2016, and has been awarded internationally. In 2018 Govan was hired to direct an episode of Ava Duvernay's Queen Sugar.

Filmography

Junkanoo: The Heartbeat of a People (2000)
Where I’m From: HIV and AIDS (2004)
Rain (2008)
Womanish Ways, Freedom, Human Rights & Democracy: The Women's Suffrage Movement in The Bahamas 1948-1962 (2012)
Play the Devil (2016)
Queen Sugar: No Haven in My Shadow (2018)