CTFF Flashback: Redemption Tales

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By Danny Sheahan

The CaribbeanTales International Film Festival is an annual film festival that showcases new works from the Caribbean. In the case of Redemption Tales, CTFF 2018 featured new film works from Jamaica.

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​The first film that screened was director Kevin Jackson’s animated short film Abeeku and the Maroons (2018). The film is the first part of a series of films that tells the story of an escaped slave named Abeeku, who escapes from a plantation with his pregnant sister. He must find a group of freedom fighters, known as the Maroons, to help him fully escape with his sister.

Although a neat attempt, the film unfortunately falls short of being a strong production; animation, audio quality, voice acting and writing - all fall short of helping the narrative. 

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​The next film to screen was director Joshua Paul’s short film Kinto (2018). Kinto tells the story of a young homeless boy who spends his days cleaning people’s car windshields and begging for money on the street. The boy’s morals are tested as he faces horribly harsh circumstances, such as being mugged in an alley, or resorting to eating food in a garbage dumpster in order to avoid starving to death.

This film may be a little hard to watch for some because of how graphic some scenes are, but these reflect a harsh reality that many people face on a daily basis. This makes the short really effective at driving home its main message, but also does so without using any dialogue from the main character. It’s a tough thing to be able successfully tell a story using only body language and actions, rather than using words and conversations. Kudos to Joshua Paul for achieving that.

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​The third film to screen was the documentary short film ​The Incursion (2018) from director Sasha-Gay Lewis. This documentary features interviews with residents from Jamaica who had survived the Tivoli Incursion, which was an armed conflict between Jamaica’s military, police, and gunmen from the local drug cartel. The conflict led to the deaths of at least 73 innocent people and over 500 arrests.

​The film is very serious in tone throughout (albeit with a few moments of genuinely funny moments in passing). Interview subjects have the memories of loved ones who had passed in the conflict, still fresh on their minds after nearly eight years. The raw emotion that flow out of each person interviewed in The Incursion is so genuine and powerful. It really makes the audience emotionally connect with each person’s situation, while also providing a more direct perspective on such a horrifying moment in contemporary Jamaican history. People are still feeling the pain of the Incursion, and may very well, never emotionally recover.

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​The final film featured in the night was director Kaneal Gayle’s documentary film Dancehall’s Asian Ambassadors (2018). The documentary takes a look at the lives of four women living in Jamaica, originally from Japan, who love Dancehall music so much that they built their whole lives and careers around it. One woman is a Dancehall DJ, one is a dancer and choreographer, the other is a former Dancehall artist, and one is a Dancehall radio jockey. All of these Japanese women genuinely love the music and speak passionately about their love of the entire Dancehall culture in general.

​Issues of cultural appropriation are constantly brought up in conversations about Japanese people taking Dancehall music, and Jamaican culture, and bringing it to Japan. However, all of the interview subjects say that this is a wonderful thing. Acting as Dancehall ambassadors and spreading Dancehall music to other places around the world, is viewed as a beautiful way of sharing the music to them. However, some people still find the idea of Jamaican themed locations in Japan to be problematic and offensive. 

​Keeping these issues in mind, Dancehall’s Asian Ambassadors is a fun film that’s both light-hearted and informative on the four women’s lives living in the Dancehall culture. It’s especially fun to watch if one finds themselves to be immersed in Dancehall music as well. Although the pacing of the documentary falls a little flat by not flowing in a strong sense of forward direction, the film is fun nonetheless just from the colourful personalities of Dancehall’s lovely Asian Ambassadors. They genuinely appreciate the culture they’ve immersed themselves into, and have no intentions of feeling at home anywhere else.