Does Jamaica have a film industry?

When approaching research on the Jamaican Film Industry, it felt counter-intuitive to question its existence. Despite it being the core of my master's thesis, when speaking with 19 interviewees, I often posed this question as an opener, and the answer wasn’t always ‘Yes’.

Why is that? 

Jamaica formally announced the JSDI – the Jamaica Screen Development Initiative in January 2024. Earmarking JMD$ 1 billion (approx. USD$ 6.4 million) in funding that seeks to provide financing for the development and production of film and television on the island. While its outcome is still yet to be seen:

Jamaican film “has performed inconsistently over time and remained marginal to the country’s economy throughout the decades” (Martens, 2023).

Ah. That’s why the resounding answer wasn’t -YES! 

It became clear that Jamaica has had ups (and downs) in policy, funding, and international production work. This has meant, that film workers regularly experience periods of feast and famine. This leads some to believe if the industry isn’t reliable, then does it exist?

However, what stood out to me was that the JSDI focuses on the local production capabilities of Jamaica. While it includes a rebate provision for international productions using Jamaica as a location, much of the fund is for local creatives and filmmakers for the development, production, completion, film festival & market attendance, and marketing & distribution of short and feature-length films. It hopes to build Jamaican films from local creatives, as the Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange, Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment, and Sport (MCGES) (Anderson-Gordon, 2024) is quoted as saying:

“Perhaps, now, we can join India’s Bollywood, Nigeria’s Nollywood and create Jamaica’s own film industry – Jollywood,” .

With the belief that the Jamaica film industry no matter how small did exist, my research focussed on what conditions are needed to facilitate or impede a film production cluster in Jamaica, similar to the infamous ‘Hollywood’ or ‘Nollywood’.

Beyond the evident geographical and population differences to the major film production areas, Jamaica’s status as a SIDS - Small Island Developing State, provided an opportunity to consider it a template for other small island states. Small film hubs or clusters are not unheard of, examples like Malta and Denmark gave some hope that strategic investment could reap reel rewards. Yet the added characteristics of marine ecosystems, remoteness, high transportation costs, high costs per capita for healthcare, plus vulnerability to both economic shocks and climate change - all associated with SIDS status made comparisons tricky.

Yet if we rely on history alone, despite Jamaican independence in 1962, international productions go as far back as the early twentieth century in 1901 (Martens, 2023, p. 7). Nearly 70 international productions are listed to have taken place between 1910 and 2010, not including local, TV or documentary productions (Polack, 2017, pp. 6–8). So there was a history that needed to be updated with the realities of Jamaican film-making today and piece together a holistic picture of the potential there is to come.

This series will highlight the most salient parts of my research. I’ll present to you:

• Film-making in Jamaica Today

• Financing Films in Jamaica

• Jamaican Film: Skills and Resources

• Film [and] Culture: The Case of Jamaica

• Jamaican Film Policy Recommendations

What do you think? Does Jamaica have a film industry? What constitutes a Jamaican film?

You can also read this on my LinkedIn.

Sources:

Anderson-Gordon, M. (2024a, February 1). Billions in Media Value from Bob Marley Movie Premiere – Jamaica Information Service. Jamaica Information Service. https://jis.gov.jm/billions-in-media-value-from-bob-marley-movie-premiere/

Martens, E. (2023). The failing promise of the audio-visual industries for national development: the history of seventy years of film policy in Jamaica, 1948–2018. Creative Industries Journal, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2023.2223379

Polack, P. (2017). Jamaica, the land of film. Cambridge Scholars Publishing