Made in Jamaica

If you like reggae music, you'll really like this film. I saw it at sold-out screening at a French Film festival in Washington (the director and producers are French). The audience, including many Jamaicans, was very complimentary afterwards.

All but one of the music scenes were filmed live and the music is great. It concentrated on performers who still live in Jamaica. The director somehow got great access to many performances in Trenchtown and the other inner-city neighborhoods in Kingston that are off the beaten tourist path.

There was a mix of classic reggae (Third World; Bunny Wailer, who is Bob Marley's half brother; the sweet-voiced Gregory Isaacs; and the dynamic Toots and the Maytals), along with a group of contemporary male and female "dancehall" performers--who while respectful of their reggae elders--have their own raucous and often crude styles. But most of them are very compelling performers.

While it's true that the "documentary" aspects could have been a bit more organized (a narrator might have helped), the film cumulatively provides a seemingly true slice of life of just how important music is in the lives of Jamaicans and also how rough life is in the mean streets of Kingston.

I understand that this film still lacks an American distributor. Someone should see the potential and grab it!

The director himself said he was supported by Wim Wenders. But where's the inspiration that made Buena Vista S. C. ? The film is a long (too long) compilation of various Jamaican music artists (some are even lost in their own paradoxes - peace, violence ? - which the director isn't able to highlight). We'd been waiting for a special input, a guide to this music ; instead we're getting a well built editing of music clips, with the classical usual interviews between them to remind us that we're in front of a product which is pretending to be a documentary. Not at all. Splitting a few interviews between music bits takes more talent to make us hang on 100'. The set of Jamaica is almost absent, very little of the music context is shown; the concept of poverty explained by newly come wealthy stars isn't enough to explain and justify reggae & dancehall. This old recipe of making documentaries is tasteless in Laperroussaz cuisine.

As the Professor from the Sorbonne basically states, all the music is very passionate, very well executed, very soulful. The CDs are two long disks of great Jamaican music. The movie adds some visuals, but takes something away from the pure passionate gift of these great performances. Still, its a pretty amazing movie with wall-to-wall great music which exposes all the vast contradictions of the Jamaicans, and really all human groups. Great CD, good movie, great review from the Professor. If you like reggae, gangsta rap, old soul music or music performance movies, you might like this. The movie does have a point of view, and that point of view is not black and white, and twice as interesting because of that. Some of the non-performance settings for the music performance footage are a bit silly, but mostly it all flies by on the wings of great music, and footage of interesting, brilliant folks doing interesting things.