This is a US film shot on a microbudget, and yet is so fresh, original, and uplifting that it's overcome the modest means. The genesis for the movie is kooky, Ben Chace actually won two cruise tickets to Jamaica at a film festival event. So him and his buddy Sam decided to make a film out of that, and bought another two tickets, one for an actor and one for a crew member.
So the film is about a young man who wins a cruise to Jamaica. He ends up alone and lonely on a cruise liner full of sextuagenarians and above. So when the ship docks in Jamaica he's got cabin fever and decides he's really going to go for some local flavour and keep clear of the tourist traps. What follows is a delightful and mind-expanding walkabout in tropical Jamaica, along with trials and tribulations. A lot of the scenes are improvised and almost documentary-like, and you can fully savour the freshness that comes out of that. Lady Luck has thrown a kind eye on these two filmmakers, at the time the film was being made Obama was winning the US presidential election and they capture a lot of the authentic unstaged Jamaican reaction to that, which is quite heartwarming.
You've got an American teenager who for once actually looks like an American teenager you could know or meet and he's taken out of his cotton wool bubble-wrapped existence, going on a peregrination where he's hopefully going to let go of some of his need to systematise and understand, and he's going to open himself up to feeling and wonder and need.
It's a beautiful movie, that leaves you with a sense of a very worldly profundity, and is very uplifting. Here's hoping that these two guys are getting a distribution deal, it would be richly deserved. Wah Do Dem would shake up the American Indie scene like it hasn't been shook up for a while.
