REGGAE FILM FESTIVAL 2010: Tallawah's take on the highs and lows

Filmmaker Joe Trivigno (USA) dishes with Barbara Blake-Hannah about his work at the 2010 Reggae Film Festival.

The 2010 leg of the Reggae Film Festival showcased a varied, exciting menu of feature films, documentaries, music videos, and shorts, putting the spotlight of the work of a talented group of local and international filmmakers. Here’s a breakdown of the festival’s highlights and dim points.

Take Me To Hawaii!

Eleven Miles to Paradise, a thrilling two-hour feature from American filmmaker Joe Trivigno, showed off the breathtaking, Edenic beauty and magnificent geography of Hawaii; the vast similarities in pristine splendour the land shares with Jamaica were on full display. An adventure feature, Paradise follows Zack (a musician from Boston) and Big Tony (a Las Vegas bouncer mourning the death of his girlfriend), two mainland Americans, on a popular 11-mile hike on the island of Kauai, headed to the lush and mythical Kalalua, where hippies and spiritual seekers converge to be one with Mother Nature. Occasionally humorous and drenched in the spirit of the outdoors, Eleven Miles to Paradise is overlong, but it stays committed to its exploration of individuality, self-acceptance and the joy and healing inherent in nature.
Young filmmakers stand up

25-year-old Jamaican Kurt Fuller premiered his gritty, hard-knocks story Concrete Jungle, a raw and riveting look at the lives of gangsters and those caught in the crossfire in the poverty-stricken ghettoes of Kingston 12. While the film wallows in much of the violence (brazen daylight killings, for example) it seemingly condemns, there is also a warm side involving romantic conquests, ambition, music and the pursuit of dreams. Dimaggio: The Last Don, a fast-paced documentary highlighting the work of Downsound Records boss Joseph Bagdanovich, came from another young Jamaican – Peter Dean Rickards, a photographer and writer-turned budding director. It’s surprisingly one-note, but The Last Don is still an admirable effort.

Reggae is a universal language

If there was inadequate proof that the impact of reggae music has been global in scope, the doubts were quickly put to rest during the festival, which saw the screening of reggae-based submissions from Slovenia, Japan, Spain, Germany, the United States, Ghana and the United Kingdom, among several other countries. RuffN Tuff: Founders of the Immortal Riddim from Japanese filmmaker Shizuo Ishii was a superb standout that traces the roots and evolution of Jamaican music from ska, mento and rocksteady to reggae and dancehall. A series of in-depth interviews and behind-the-scenes footage with such stalwarts of the industry as Gladstone ‘Glady’ Anderson, U-Roy and Leroy Sibbles gave the production extra muscle.

Coretta Singer (right) talks to host Amber (of Irie FM) about her work in animation filmmaking.

Women behind the camera get their due

In almost any given industry it is difficult for women to get their stories told. This year, the Reggae Film Festival offered a cozy platform for a handful of female voices to be heard. While Barbara Blake-Hannah re-introduced Kids Paradise, popular music video director Kimala Bennett took a departure with her documentary Combing Through the Roots of Black Hair. Meanwhile, Jamaican newcomer Coretta Singer unveiled her animation short, Kina Sky, a colourful and buoyant hymn to life that emerged from the most unlikely of sources. “I was inspired to do it by the death of a friend. I was very depressed and I just decided to do it,” she told TALLAWAH following the screening. While the genre is not the most appealing, Singer hopes animation filmmaking will eventually find its true place in the Jamaican industry. “I hope it takes off because lot of people draw and are into art. It can be seriously successful,” she argues.

Glitches and delays… can any festival escape them?

Though many strive for excellence, festival organizers know all too well that unforeseen hurdles tend to emerge over the course of the event. The best laid plans don’t always come off without flaw. That said, on the downside, the festival proceedings this year frequently ran behind schedule, resulting in the exclusion or re-scheduling of some screenings. On Day 3, in particular, there were numerous hiccups mainly due to the transfer of the evening screenings from the Hilton to Winchester Road.