‘Real’ Jamaica not fun in the sun

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/06/2002 (8546 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IF you’ve been wondering what the protests at the G-8 summit are all about, this urgent documentary will tell you.

Filmmaker Stephanie Black wants to make you look at news headlines in a different way. She also wants you to re-evaluate the banana you slice over your cereal in the morning, your Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, your winter getaway to some palmy tropical resort.

Life and Debt examines the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the effects of globalization and free trade on developing nations. Black gives these abstract issues a human face by setting her film in one place: Jamaica, a country that gained its independence from Britain in 1962 only to find itself enmeshed in a new kind of economic colonialism.

She interviews academics, bureaucrats and former Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley, who speaks with articulate passion about his country’s history and future. The most illuminating sections of the film, however, are with everyday people — potato farmers, garment workers, activists.

Black argues that the IMF and the World Bank serve the industrialized nations of Europe and North America at the expense of developing countries; that the massive loans ostensibly intended to lead Third World countries to full independence have, in fact, compounded the problems of poverty and unemployment.

Black isn’t interested in making a cautiously neutral and objective documentary. (The interviews with a high-ranking official of the IMF aren’t there to provide neo-conservative balance; they’re there to show the guy up as evasive and patronizing.) Black is making an unapologetically angry and unexpectedly poetic film.

The numbers are there: Jamaica’s debt load is a staggering $7 billion US and rising. Of each dollar the government collects in taxes, 62 cents go to servicing the loan. The facts are there: Because of tariff and trade policies imposed by the IMF as a condition of loan renegotiations, Jamaica is flooded with cheap, government-subsidized powdered milk from the United States, for example, while its own farmers end up pouring thousands of gallons of milk into ditches and selling their dairy cattle for hamburger.

These hard-nosed arguments are set against an elliptical voiceover narration adapted from Jamaica Kincaid’s non-fiction book A Small Place. The film is framed as a visit to Jamaica made by a North American tourist addressed as “you.” “You” are too busy having a fun-in-the-sun vacation to think about where the contents of your toilet are going (a rotten infrastructure means they’re headed straight into that clear blue sea); about where your food is coming from (all the hotel restaurant’s “local delicacies” are being shipped in from Miami); about the workers who are trying to entertain you by organizing the best tan-line contests, the dancing lessons, the air-conditioned bus tours to the “real Jamaica.”

Black makes it clear that most of us in the First World have not yet seen the real Jamaica — and that much of our complacent comfort relies on us never seeing it.