Caribbean Celluloid: Telling Our Stories on Film
A photo of Joanne C. Hillhouse holding her book, Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure
Photo by Annetta Jackson, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda
One Love. That’s right, this session is about film – not just that film though, but Caribbean film more broadly and specifically ones I’ve seen this half year. Twice in the case of Bob Marley: One Love.
Why so soup?
Because I liked how the film looked and sounded – and not just because of the abundant use of Bob’s music. It was as vibrant as our Caribbean, and the music was used a lot, but well-placed narratively. In fact, it probably erred on narrative placement over accuracy but any biopic is in part a work of fiction, of framing. And I liked the framing. I feel that too many biopics try to do too much with overstuffed, unevenly paced cradle to grave narratives. So, One Love having the story bookended by two pivotal Jamaican concerts – Smile Jamaica in 1976 and the One Love peace concert in 1977, focusing on the making of the Exodus album while Marley was in exile in England, with well-chosen flashbacks for reference – worked. It gave thematic focus and excised things not relevant to the story being told. Story is point of view. We, of course, saw the fallout from people who felt the film left them out or didn’t tell the story in full. But it works as story to me.
And I love that it’s a love story. With Bob’s wife and her children being principally involved behind the scenes, that love story, beyond the man and his music, was the love ballad of Bob and Rita – their life and musical partnership. I’ll leave it to the musicologists to argue about which song was actually written for this or that other of Bob’s paramours. Life and love is complicated, and the movie doesn’t shy away from the complicated truths of their union, but it is consistent in its framing of Rita as Bob’s one true love. I’m not mad at it for that. Perhaps I came into it with the bias of having read Rita’s memoir No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley years ago. I remember feeling great empathy for her, and a certain resonance between her and women I know who are asked to bear the impossible with grace, at risk of being branded bitter and toxic, as though women are not also human.
I love that the movie made space for that, for the ways Rita claimed her voice and demanded her respect when she felt Bob going astray – not just in terms of other women but in terms of his purpose at the height of celebrity.
Much respect to Lashana Lynch (Rita) and Kingsley Ben-Adir (Bob) for doing what Hollywood rarely does: inhabit Caribbean characters in a specific way body, soul, and, especially, voice. The film has a Black American director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, who most recently helmed the Richard Williams biopic King Richard and is a co-production of Brad Pitt’s Plan B and the Marley Family’s Tuff Gong, with Hollywood conglomerate Paramount distributing. But credit to Bob’s children: Ziggy, very active in both production and promotion of the film, Cedella, also a producer, and other Marley siblings who were involved in shepherding the project. Credit to Lashana and Kingsley for the work they put in to understanding the people they were playing. Credit to whomever had the good sense to employ the services of experts in Jamaican linguistics. Shortly after watching the film, for the second time, and still hungry for content around it, I watched a discussion (1) with Kingsley who has Trinidadian grandparents (while fellow Brit Lashana’s parents are actually Jamaican). In that discussion, I got a sense of how seriously he took this, prepping for the role in his downtime on the set of Barbie where he was one of the Kens. It matters that he understood that Caribbean languages are languages with a history and a system, and, like any language, evolved the vocabulary they need to say what they need to say and that there are nuances and context and layers to that.
As a born and raised Caribbean woman, I was particularly delighted by some of the non-verbals from both of them but Lashana especially. A natural eeeeh, e-heh, hmmm, choops, noise in the back of the throat, cut eye, or lip movement communicates specific things to those who understand the code. A lot of times people doing Caribbean accents miss those micro-gestures and sound like I imagine I must have sounded when I was learning Spanish and trying to hold a conversation with a native speaker – overly formal and off riddim. Of course, while I lived in Jamaica a long time ago, I am not Jamaican and a Jamaican might disagree that they got it right and I’m not here to argue with them, but I do think this came as close as I’ve ever seen to a film out of Hollywood getting it right.
The way they moved and existed in their bodies was another thing; credit especially to Kingsley who with every stride and hop made me…I won’t go as far as to say he made me forget Bob but he pushed himself (Kingsley) into the background of this man he was trying to inhabit and throughout much of the movie I was right there with him. With Lashana, it was more subtle but also more grounded. Frankly, I hope neither of them is forgotten around awards time – Lashana especially could make a strong push for supporting actress, and I say that only because of the politics of award season. Notwithstanding the snubbing of Lashana’s award-worthy performance in The Woman King, it seems easier for Black actors, still, to contend in the supporting categories.
Let’s see what else. I liked the symbolic reveal of the dream sequences, that though it seemed to be and at times may have been his physical father, in the end it wasn’t the white man and the horse chasing him but his spiritual father, as a Rasta, calling him home, to Africa…and giving him permission to stop running and rest. I liked the flashes we got of Bob and Rita’s courtship, the dynamics of that (he would go on to be the superstar but she was the catch). I liked little moments like the palm reading on the pier which I missed on first viewing but after reading Jamaican writer Geoffrey Philp’s article referencing “Bob’s psychic ability” (2) caught on second viewing. I liked, no, loved, that on first viewing we, all of us there in the theatre, left singing. It was such a joyful experience – that first viewing – that I was caught off guard by how reflective, even pensive, I felt after the second viewing. It was the kind of movie I wanted to talk about with people. But the film’s recent best movie win at the BET awards and a box office gross just under US$180 million on a US$70 million production budget, and status as the fifth highest-grossing musical biopic, per Billboard (3), notwithstanding, most of my friends haven’t bothered to see it. They heard it wasn’t good, wasn’t true, had too much Black grievance (?!), that Jamaicans didn’t like it. Well, I think it was good (not perfect), every biopic is a version of a story, smh at the “Black grievance” comment, and while some Jamaicans didn’t like it, many also did. Why not see it for yourself and then come talk, was how I felt.
I do also feel that we need to give our stories, imperfect though they are, a chance at commercial viability; how else will we get more? As well as it performed, I think it could have done better. Freeing up the money will take viewers (box office) and success in other areas (like awards) especially in an industry prone to regurgitating stale IPs ad nauseum over betting on new and creative ideas and foregrounding traditionally marginalized voices. When one of ours sneaks through, you don’t have to love it, critique is necessary, but see it.
We have such a range of stories to tell and so many of them die on the vine or are dependent on a shoestring model of filmmaking.
I’m not steeped in the industry, but I have some experience. I’ve written screenplays (see my sixth RESIDENCY article) and I’ve facilitated scriptwriting workshops with young members of the Antigua and Barbuda Film Academy, some of whom have gone on to publish and film their stories. And going back more than 20 years, I was involved as associate producer and production manager, respectively, on Antigua and Barbuda’s first and second feature length films – HAMAfilms’ The Sweetest Mango (4) and No Seed. There was no infrastructure nor template for what we were doing. This was before orange economy was even a buzz phrase and even now it feels little more than words in a region where investment in arts projects by public or private sector entities, or hybrids of both is still extremely limited and inflexible.
These days, …well, it’s still a miracle to get any film made, much less a quality, well-funded one, but we have models, and funding avenues specific to Caribbean film, narrow though they are, exist.
One such avenue for seven Caribbean filmmakers was a 2020 Commonwealth lab (for script development) and film funding initiative, “Commonwealth Shorts, Caribbean Voices”(5). I will note that my experience with Caribbean film and film in general leads me to speculate that while the Commonwealth provided the bulk of the funding, there were likely a number of cash and kind contributions from regional entities as our industry is still very much a patchwork affair. I caught a screening of the “Commonwealth Shorts” during a mini-festival at Caribbean Cinemas Antigua in May 2024. Screened were Parable of the Bees (Directed by Melanie Grant, Barbados), about disappearing bees and an angry river goddess, Afieni (Directed by Felene Cayetano, Belize), in which a woman faces the consequences of rejecting the spirituality of her Indigenous community, Forget Me Not (Directed by Amanda John, Grenada), about dementia, Eating Pawpaw on the Seashore (Directed by Rae Wiltshire, Guyana), about forbidden love in a coastal town, Sonshine (Directed by Kaleb D’Aguilar, Jamaica), the story of a grieving mother who cannot accept reality, Parliament Girls (Directed by Akley Olton, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), which features a group of masque’d female vigilantes, and Departures (Directed by Elenie Chung, Trinidad and Tobago), in which the burial of a turtle evokes the feelings of loss around pending partings. With my two in-cinema viewings of One Love, that is more Caribbean films than I’ve seen in a year, much less half of one, in a really long time. I knew as I watched that I wanted to talk about those films for a little window into what’s happening in contemporary Caribbean film. Full disclosure, I missed two (Parable of the Bees, Sonshine) of the seven as I was late to the theatre and have tried but have not been able to source screeners, so these two are omitted and, as for everything else, I’m going by memory.
Coincidentally, I’m going to begin with a film about memory or fading memory, Grenadian filmmaker Amanda John’s Forget Me Not. John was present at the screening. Her drama has the feel of a finely-tuned narrative poem. It’s about dementia and the heartbreak of that, yes, but more deeply it’s about connections. I say it feels like a narrative poem because it does have a story structure, there is a plot arc, even a bit of mystery; but, though it is more linear than and not as expressionistic or stylized as some of the other shorts, it’s not pedantic and is rich in symbolism (I may have seen enough to call this a feature of Caribbean film). To draw on the film’s garden imagery in its title and visuals, it unfurls like a morning glory and, as its petals open, more is revealed, the audience experiencing that dawning revelation as a sinking feeling in the stomach. Kudos to the actors Rose Bhagwan and especially theatre veteran Robert Whyte.
Speaking of poetry, Guyanese filmmaker Rae Wiltshire is an auteur (producer-director-writer-actor) who has created a sublime and symbolic meditation on the queer, teen Caribbean experience. His Eating Pawpaw on the Seashore acknowledges the homophobia in the environment of the young lovers – and in the theatre during the viewing where there was derision, uncomfortable laughter, and at least one walkout in my section. But, through water and fruit imagery, the film cocoons and protects the love of the two teenage boys whose friendship and more is at the center of the story. Visually, the cinematography feels like a pastel watercolour painting, tonally it feels gentle and sensual, and its very existence is thematically defiant. The director has said that “I made Eating Papaw on the Seashore to reflect queer boys as human beings who can fall in love and that it is not something to laugh about. It is natural. In Guyana, the idea of being gay is a joke. I do not laugh and wanted to reflect human beings onscreen. It was important to capture the humanity of a group of people who often do not feel accepted by society.” (sic) (6)
With Departures, these are probably my top three from a “that’s cinema!” standpoint – in terms of visual storytelling and production values. I would say story except Elenie Chung’s Departures is less story, more vibe. You feel the connection between the two girls/young women – but the nature of that connection is not spelled out (they’re sister-friends, I think). You experience a certain melancholy – but no certainty as to why (though there is some foreshadowing of physical distance and loss). It’s two girls/young women in the pool area (largely) of a house, a lot of hanging about… and a turtle. In it, I felt a certain tonal loneliness and yearning. There’s more being said than is seen in a film in which little is said but much is expressed.
Belizean Felene M. Cayetano’s Afieni is about the tension between our present and past selves, dramatized through the rejection of African spirituality, even the healing aspects of it that have served us. Not as smooth in execution (it and Parliament Girls), it is nonetheless a rich and meaningful viewing experience – with a certain earnestness and earthiness. Film is said to be a director’s medium and that’s felt here as the intention behind the lens, via writer-director Felene whose brand celebrates her Garifuna identity, is what makes this one land. As she said, “This is a colossal shift from intangible to tangible possibility at a time when Garifuna beliefs and practices are becoming diluted.” (7)
Another film that leans into Caribbean-African references is Vincy filmmaker’s Akley Olton’s Parliament Girls which uses masque imagery (Carnival-esque masques, specifically) and rituals suggestive of obeah in its darkly twisty vengeance thriller that seeks to re-empower the victims of sexual violence. It has some pacing issues and the imagery is the most striking aspect in this low-on-dialogue, fairly straightforward retribution narrative.
These are just some of the filmmakers that probably won’t come up if you put “Caribbean Films” into Google – my search spit out Cool Runnings, The Harder They Come, How Stella got Her Groove Back, Shottas, Sugar Cane Alley, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dancehall Queen, and Bazodee (8) as the top responses. Some of these also show up on a crowdsourced list of “Best Caribbean Movies” (9) – Cool Runnings at 1, Bazodee at 2, Sugar Cane Alley at 3, Shottas at 4, Dancehall Queen at 7, How Stella got Her Groove Back at 8, The Harder They Come at 11, and Pirates of the Caribbean at 17. I’ve seen most of these films and only a few (The Harder They Come by Jamaican Perry Henzell, Shottas by Jamaican Cess Silvera, Sugar Cane Alley by Martinique’s Euzhan Palcy…arguably Dancehall Queen which was co-directed by Don Letts whose parents are Jamaican) have Caribbean directors.
Now, if you didn’t know them (i.e. the directors of the film shorts discussed) and their work before, you have some new and most importantly “indigenous” Caribbean writer-directors, including some of their mentors in the “Caribbean Voices” initiative, whose cultural ethos and storytelling styles are not made in Hollywood, to track and root for, and, yes, critique, as that’s all part of the ecosystem of art making.
ENDNOTES
(1) “Kingsley Ben-Adir Talks About Learning Jamaican for Bob Marley: One Love”, Braadkyaas Jamiekan, https://bit.ly/3WtSQWY
(2) “Meeting Bob: One Love, One Life” by Geoffrey Philp, Swamp, https://vocal.media/theSwamp/meeting-bob
(3) “‘Bob Marley: One Love’ Passes ‘Rocketman’ to Become One of the Top 5 Highest-Grossing Music Biopics: Here’s the Top 25” by Paul Grein, Billboard, https://bit.ly/3LKqK4L
(4) “The Making of The Sweetest Mango”, HaMatv Antigua, YouTube, https://bit.ly/3WGAWSi
(5) “Commonwealth Shorts, Caribbean Voices”, Commonwealth Foundation, https://bit.ly/3YtPfLd
(6) Director’s statement, “Eating Papaw on the Seashore” (sic), FilmFreeway, https://bit.ly/4d2RZ6O
(7) Ibid., (5)
(8) Bazodee review on Jhohadli blog, https://bit.ly/3yoejZt
(9) “The Best Caribbean Movies Selected By Caribbean People”, West Indian Diplomacy, https://bit.ly/46u17yN
See also:
The playlist of songs I listened to while working on RESIDENCY 5, Antiguan Writer YouTube channel, https://bit.ly/4c0DWNK
More Caribbean film lists –
“10 Caribbean Films to watch” by Ursula Petula Barzey, Caribbean & Co., https://bit.ly/3ymJ0OK
“10 Essential Films for An Introduction to Caribbean Cinema” by Ivan Negroni, https://bit.ly/3WIPwZm
“CREATIVE SPACE #11 OF 2020 – IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT NETFLIX”, Jhohadli blog, https://bit.ly/3LIvDvr
“Playwrights and Screenwriters (the Antigua-Barbuda connection)”, Wadadli Pen blog, https://bit.ly/3LIJBNI
Also by Joanne C. Hillhouse:
Don’t Sleep on Caribbean Fantasy and Science Fiction: Caribbean Futurism
