Tiger / Tiguere

Award-winning filmmaker José Maria Cabral’s unflinching, semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age feature offers a breathless exploration of toxic masculinity as it examines a teenager’s act of defiance towards machismo culture in the Dominican Republic.

A group of male adolescents are recruited by their parents into a bootcamp to be forged into hustlers, players, “tigueres”. This archetype is the highest idealization of the male character in Dominican and Caribbean culture. Alberto is the head coach of this camp who decides that Pablo’s time has come to join the group. But Pablo, his son, is a Tiguere in his own right, unbeknownst to Alberto, whose coming-of-age process clashes with his father’s authoritarian views. This leads Pablo on a journey of self-discovery.