Caribbean Film Series: A 5th Anniversary Festival, Mar 14—17 at BAM

Celebrate Five Landmark Years of Caribbean Cinema at the Caribbean Film Series: A 5th Anniversary Festival, Mar 14—17 at BAM

Reggae producer Blacker Dread in BEING BLACKER (2018).  Courtesy: Molly Dineen

From Thursday, March 14 through Sunday, March 17, Caribbean Film Academy, The Luminal Theater, Third Horizon, and BAM Film present Caribbean Film Series: A 5th Anniversary Festival, a four-day festival marking the five-year anniversary of the Caribbean Film Series, a platform for great contemporary films from the Caribbean and the diaspora. In shorts, narrative feature films, and documentaries from Jamaica, Haiti, the U.K., Puerto Rico, and more, the series explores the thematic and aesthetic diversity of Caribbean cinema.

The series begins with Opening Night film Yardie (2018), Idris Elba’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Victor Headley’s novel of the same name set in 70's Kingston and 80's London, with lead actor Aml Ameen (Sense8, The Maze Runner) in attendance for a post-screening Q&A alongside Sheldon Shepherd (Betta Mus Come, one-half of music group No-Madzz); the Closing Night selection is Khalik Allah’s transcendent documentary portrait of Jamaica, Black Mother (2018), with Allah in attendance at the screening.  

Also of note is the Friday night NY premiere of Being Blacker (2018), a documentary about renowned reggae and record shop owner from Brixton, Blacker Dread, and local filmmaker Christine Shaw's Panorama: Jamming to the Top, which follows a vibrant community of people in Brooklyn who love steel pan and are fighting to keep it alive in Brooklyn. Caribbean Diaspora Shorts showcase.  

Also of special note are Sunday's retrospective films on Guyana with the films of Guyana’s Victor Jara Collective. The Terror and the Time – their first film – focuses on the upheavals in 1953 in what was then British Guiana. Banned by the Guyanese government, it would be five years before the collective made their second and final film, In the Sky’s Wild Noise (1983). A mid-length work, it features the assassinated historian and activist Walter Rodney, author of the seminal book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.