I thought this was a documentary on Jamaica but it’s a really an experimental art film. It was made by an American filmmaker Khalik Allah to explore his Jamaican heritage. While it’s quite impressive as a sensory experience, there’s no overall narrative here and no real attempt to convey any hard facts about the country. That makes it tough to sustain interest throughout the entire the film even though it’s a relatively short one.

There’s an old dictum about how all films are really made in the editing and this is truer than most for this particular project. It consists of footage, both old and new, of many people and sights in Jamaica, spliced together with recordings of them speaking and lots of lots of prayer. Running in parallel is record of a black woman from pregnancy to giving birth as a sort of aesthetic overlay. Early some of the recorded interviews touch on some of the country’s history and in particular their grievances against the UK as their former colonial masters and slaveowners. But education isn’t the film’s focus and later on most of the recordings are of prayer sessions. It’s chaotic, with street scenes, shots of a crocodile swimming in a river, the landscape, the run-down houses, all mixed up together. It does give you a strong impression of what kind of place Jamaica is but it doesn’t give you any solid information at all and it’s quite exhausting to keep up with this stream of consciousness style of filmmaking without more context and something tangible to hold on to.

The film is immediately very attractive as the level of craft that went into the visuals and synchronizing the shots with the sound and music is palpable. Even the recordings of the people speaking about their grievances, repeating key lines over and over again, feel like a chant of some kind. But after a while, it becomes evident that this is all there is to the film but it becomes much less interesting. Perhaps someone one can discern a deeper theme but from what I can tell it’s all about evoking a sense of place for Jamaica, warts and all. I would have far preferred something that truly told you the stories of all of the different people we meet but instead all we get is this jumbled assortment of testimonies with no clue about the people saying these things. This may be short for a film but it is kind of long for something that is trying to be audio-visual poetry. By the end, there is so much prayer, all repetitions of the same sentiment and style, that it’s just boring and aimless.

It still interesting to get a look into Jamaica and I’m reminded of how similar it is in some ways to my memories of living in the Solomon Islands. Down in fact to the presence of Chinese shopkeepers. I know that this is probably a case of the filmmaker turning the camera on and letting the people in the street say whatever they want, right or wrong, After all there are also people in this film who attacks the many churches on the island as being all about business and making money. But I feel that the filmmaker is still tacitly condoning the anti-Chinese prejudice and the familiar claims that the shopkeepers are selling poison. This also highlights the difficulty of filming raw sentiment and popular stereotypes which break down when placed under any sort of scrutiny.

In the end, I think this doesn’t work too well on its own. There’s just too little information in it so there’s no context to hang all those disparate scenes around. Maybe it works better for those who already know the country or are watching this in tandem with a good book to get a visceral feeling for what it’s like on the street. But as it is, I have to say a firm no on this one.