A Garifuna-language teacher, Ricardo, struggles to preserve his endangered Afro-Amerindian culture by building a language school in his home village in Honduras. A business venture with his brother designed to raise money for the school’s construction becomes complicated by the expansion plans of a nearby tourist resort into indigenous territory. Historical parallels are invoked as Ricardo’s son rehearses a stage play about the Garifuna people’s last stand against British colonialism over 200 years ago in their motherland, the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean.

Naturalistically shot, with debut performances by nearly the entire cast, Garifuna in Peril is the first major feature film with the majority of dialogue in Garifuna, an Arawakan language (with a high number of loanwords from Carib and European languages) indigenous to the Caribbean islands of St. Vincent before its speakers (of mixed West/Central African, Arawakan, and Kalinago ancestry) were deported by the British to Honduras in 1797.