About Us

ABOUT SPIRIT OF '38 PRODUCTIONS

Spirit of ’38 Productions is an independent documentary film house concerned with a simple but difficult proposition: that the history of the Caribbean belongs not to the footnote, the archive, or the official commemorative speech, but to the people whose labor, courage, and imagination made that history.

The Caribbean has repeatedly been treated as a small stage upon which larger powers conduct their affairs. Yet its peoples have long confronted the central questions of the modern world: colonial rule and emancipation; labor and power; race, nation, and international solidarity; the right of ordinary people to shape the society in which they live. We make films in that tradition of inquiry. Our work follows the political and social histories that mainstream media too often ignores, smooths over, or consigns to silence.

Independence is therefore more than a business arrangement. It is a condition of the work. We research, develop, direct, edit, and distribute our films with the freedom to pursue the evidence where it leads. The purpose is not merely to recover a past, but to make its conflicts intelligible in the present: to show that history is made by people acting together under circumstances they did not choose.

The Name

The name Spirit of ’38 joins two decisive Jamaican moments separated by a century.

In 1838, full emancipation brought the legal abolition of slavery in Jamaica. It did not end the struggle for land, dignity, economic security, or political power. It established the ground on which that struggle would continue.

In 1938, Jamaican workers rose in labor rebellion. Their action helped set in motion the political transformations that would reshape Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. The events demonstrated, once again, that when working people enter history as conscious actors, the old order cannot remain unchanged.

These dates are not ornaments. They are a reminder that freedom is neither bestowed from above nor completed in a single declaration. It must be defended, enlarged, and understood anew by each generation. Through film, Spirit of ’38 carries that inheritance forward.

Richard Audley Vaughan — Founder & Filmmaker

Richard Audley Vaughan is an award-winning independent filmmaker and visual historian based in Oakland, California, and a son of the Jamaican diaspora. His practice brings research and filmmaking into direct relation, examining political movements not as abstractions but as human dramas shaped by conviction, compromise, pressure, and collective action.

Vaughan works across the entire process of production: research, direction, editing, and distribution. This is not a gesture of individualism for its own sake. It preserves the continuity between the question asked, the evidence assembled, the people heard, and the final film. It permits a documentary to remain accountable to its subject rather than to the calculations of executives or the fashion of the moment.

His work has received recognition from the Madrid International Filmmaker Festival and the Amsterdam Film Festival. Its enduring measure, however, lies in its commitment to cultural and political education: rigorous in its inquiry, independent in its making, and clear about the stakes of the stories it tells.

Our Filmography

Acts of Historical Reclamation

The Price of Love: Cheddi Jagan (2024) examines the Guyanese leader’s long struggle against colonial machinations and international political pressure. It considers the costs borne by a movement determined to place national self-determination at the center of public life.

Four Years of Love: The Grenada Revolution (2021) returns to the effort to build a new social order in Grenada, and to the external forces that brought that experiment to an end. It asks what becomes possible when a people attempt to govern in their own interests—and what opposition such an attempt inevitably encounters.

Rolling Along: An Inline Movement (2017) studies urban inline skating as a global subculture and a field of community, creativity, and social possibility. It treats culture not as an escape from society, but as one of the places where society is made.

The Word Is Love: Jamaica’s Michael Manley (2012) offers a critical examination of Jamaica’s fourth Prime Minister, his relationship to the people, and the Cold War pressures that framed his political life. It is a study of power, resistance, and the difficult work of democratic transformation.

Our Philosophy

Art, advocacy, and independence are inseparable in our work. A documentary is a record, but it is also an argument about what deserves to be remembered and what lessons the present may draw from the past. We make films about independence and social justice because the Caribbean’s history has shaped the modern world and continues to shape it.

We do not wait for institutional approval before beginning the work. We mobilize resources, protect the vision, and build the channels through which the films reach their audiences. That independence makes possible a cinema rooted in research, answerable to its subjects, and free to speak plainly about power.

The spirit of ’38 is the conviction that historical knowledge becomes most alive when it returns to the people. Our films invite audiences to look again at the Caribbean, at its struggles and achievements, and at the unfinished questions it places before the world.

Explore the collection and join a continuing conversation about historical reclamation, cultural power, and the future made possible by an honest reckoning with the past.