Caribbean Studies: Films

The islands of Exuma match the picture perfect description of a Caribbean paradise. Stories, myths, and legends fuse with everyday life across the 365 islands of the Exumas. We come to learn that the treasure is scattered throughout the Exumas, from the natural Blue Holes to the fresh conch salad, the roasted grouper to the lobster and crabs. We follow the legends to discover that the land and ocean blend perfectly into the story of the Exumas. (25:19)

Bermuda may be small, but as Ross Shimmon discovers, it has a ton of amazing attractions, including some awesome wreck diving opportunities and fabulous old British fortresses. Ross explores an underground cave complex, stops by the local racetrack, and scopes out the wildlife at an impressive little zoo. Ross winds up his trip swimming with some bottlenose dolphins, eating traditional rum cake, and exploring the original slave trade route in the town of St. George’s.

Nassau is known as the "underwater film capital of the world." Some famous James Bond films have been shot on New Providence Island. Lavinia Tan checks into the British Colonial Hilton. She dives to the "Bond wreck" and swims with sharks.

Megan McCormick travels to Colombia, Panama, Florida, and the Bahamas to learn about the galleons, treasure, and pirates of the Caribbean. Megan follows the route of 17th-century Spanish galleons on their voyages to bring back gold from the New World. Christopher Columbus’s 1492 journey sparked centuries of treasure hunting and brutal competition. Megan's journey begins at the Museo del Oro (Gold Museum) in Bogota, continuing to the Camino Real mule trail. In Cartagena she takes a tour of the forts and city walls, then visits the burial place of Sir Francis Drake. Next stop is Port Royal in Jamaica to sample pirate food and drink. In the Bahamas, she learns the legend of Blackbeard. Megan ends her journey with a scuba dive off the Florida Keys to witness the last remains of the famous Spanish galleon shipwrecks. (52 minutes)

This Globe Trekker episode follows Ian Wright as he skydives onto a Havana beach and journeys through Cuba and Haiti. In the tobacco province of Pinar del Rio he lends a hand to the guajieros, visits a cigar factory, and stays in the holiday resort built by Fidel Castro's lover. Ian visits the site of the Bay of Pigs invasion and Che Guevara University before swimming with dolphins in Holguin, touring Santiago de Cuba, the country's music capital, taking a trip to Dinosaur Land, a bizarre theme park built by criminals on community service, and climbing the Gran Piedra. He continues to Port au Prince, the capital of Haiti and oldest black republic in the world. After a quick visit to Jacmel to witness a cockfight, Ian gets involved in a peasant festival, is invited to a voodoo ceremony, and ends up at a spectacular citadel in Cap Haitian. (49 minutes)

Insider’s Guide to Puerto Rico is a travel documentary featuring the island’s best destinations. Native islander Karenlie Riddering leads viewers beyond the usual tourist attractions typically visited by more than 1.4 million tourists who enter Puerto Rico each year on cruise ships alone. Insider’s Guide to Puerto Rico captures some of the most amazing and best-kept secrets of the island into a film that allows visitors and locals to discover and learn about the diverse destinations on the island, and is a historical preservation of the current state of the natural richness of the island, useful for educational, entertainment, and conservational purposes. With a population of approximately four million Puerto Ricans living in the island and an almost equal amount living elsewhere, and due to its accessibility and ease of travel from the continental U.S., the film appeals to a wide array of viewers. It is a great audiovisual tool for teachers and a way to preserve images of the current state of Puerto Rico’s natural resources for future generations.

Ian Wright takes a Jamaican journey in this Globe Trekker video. He begins in the famous hippy hangout resort of Negril, travels to a plantation house and through a crocodile swamp, and heads to Treasure Beach, a hideaway paradise. He visits Bob Marley's mausoleum, Hope Bay, where he stays with rastas who run a guest house and a school for orphans, and Port Antonio, an old fashioned resort full of colonial buildings. Jamaica has the most churches per square in the world, so Ian attends a lively, traditional service before motorbiking up the isolated Blue Mountains to visit a Maroon village. Maroons are descendants of runaway slaves who made their escape to the hills and hid out for centuries. Ian attends their drumming ceremony and visits the headman. Early in the morning Ian climbs the Blue Mountain peak to watch the sunrise and catch a glimpse of Cuba before ending his journey in Kingston at the Jamaican carnival. (46 minutes)

After the discovery of the island in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, Santo Domingo became the site of the first cathedral, hospital, customs house and university in the Americas. This colonial town, which was founded in 1498, was laid out on a grid pattern, which became the model for almost all town-planners in the New World. (12:31)

In the second program, Simon Reeve goes to Barbados, one of the wealthiest islands in the Caribbean. Learn how high-end tourism has impacted life in Barbados. In Venezuela—a poor nation, despite having some of the largest gas and oil reserves in the world—Simon looks at the mismanagement of natural resources and meets the inventive people running businesses from a ‘shanty town in the sky’, an abandoned skyscraper that is home to more than 3,000 people. Moving on to Colombia, he meets the banana farmers still living with the scars of decades of civil conflict but finds a country well on the road to recovery. A BBC Production.

Zoe Palmer arrives in cosmopolitan Fort-de-France, the island's capital. She visits historic sugar cane plantation Le Pagerie, birthplace of Empress Josephine—Napoleon Bonaparte's mistress and a supporter of colonial slavery.

Take a video tour with host Marie Cruz as she explores this lush island’s rain forest and learns the local dance steps at a Caribbean street festival. Later, she takes a helicopter ride, just above the treetops, to a secluded beach for a swim in this tropical paradise.

Camille Pissarro is one of the fathers of Impressionism. Classically trained, Pissarro’s early works were traditional, reflecting his appreciation for expressing unadulterated the beauty of nature. Growing dissatisfied with the prescriptions of traditional painting forms, he began experimenting with a style that later became known as Impressionism. His paintings began to look more spontaneous with loosely blended brushstrokes and areas of impasto, creating more depth in the piece.

Paul Gauguin is a Post-Impressionist painter, thought to be one of the most important French painters of the 19th century. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and synthetist style that were distinctly different from Impressionism. His experiments with color had a strong influence on the evolution of painting. Later in life, he moved to Tahiti, and his work reflects this new tropical landscape and culture. The essential character of his art did not change, but he developed new levels of expression in his use of color and perspective, and his forms became more voluminous.

Maple syrup from Quebec and spices from Guadeloupe are tasty topics of conversation in this program. The video also profiles scientists in Guadeloupe who discuss delicious hybrids of banana under development and spotlights exotic cuisine on the menu at the Montreal Insectarium: browned maggots, grilled grasshoppers, and fried worms! A BBC Production. A part of the series The French Experience, Series 2. (French with English subtitles, 14 minutes)

Nutmeg is so important in Grenada that it features on the national flag.

The prevalence of sugar in contemporary diets makes it hard to believe there was a time in the not-so-distant past when it was not so readily available. This episode charts the fascinating story of sugar to learn how it is inextricably linked with European expeditions to tropical islands and subsequently, the transatlantic slave trade. (50:59)

Over half a century has passed since famed poet-playwright Federico García Lorca was killed in Granada at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. He lives on, however, in his immortal Canciones, Romancero Gitano, and La Casa de Bernarda Alba and other works that captured the soul of españa and the heart of the literary world. This documentary, produced by RTVE, traces his life from Fuentevagueros in Andalusia to his death at age 38 in 1936. Archival footage and personal interviews with family members, poets, writers, and artists including Edward Albee and Philip Levine provide an accurate portrait of both Lorca the man and the literary giant. Portions of Lorca’s most famous works, interwoven throughout the program, are accompanied by contemporary images of the places he held most dear. (Spanish, 59 minutes)

Derek Walcott was born a British subject on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and studied English in school almost as a second language. In the language of great poets and literature, this winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature also discovered the tongue of political mastery: a culture imposed by white foreigners. This contradiction he confronts in both his poetry and his life, spending half the year in what he calls the prehistoric Eden of his childhood, and the other half teaching in the world’s newest empire, the U.S. In this program with Bill Moyers, Walcott discusses the power of his words and the recurring themes of the black struggle in his work. (30 minutes)

This in-depth interview with Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez is presented in the form of a conversation with an old friend he has not seen in a long while. Filmed at "Gabo’s" house in Cartagena, the program is structured to suggest an apparent disorder of time—a device used most notably in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Assisted by readings and dramatizations of his works, the master of magic realism focuses on the supernatural aspects of his spellbinding narrative style, in an effort to convey his particular vision of the world. (54 minutes)

This program analyzes the diverse forms of Caribbean popular music, tracking their roots to the traditional music of island nations such as Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Recordings of music from Maroon communities and ecstatic Kumina sects, plus examples of mento and urban reggae, provide a sampler of the region’s exciting musical hybrids—each a unique blend of African and European influences. Performers include Big Youth, Louise Bennett-Coverley, The Mummies of San Pedro de Macoris, The Congos of the Holy Spirit, Sarandunga Group of Bani, Talisman, and Mama Zeela and the Kumina of Spring Garden. (56 minutes)

Iván Acosta's Como Se Forma Una Rumba (How to Create a Rumba) sheds light on the origins and roots of some of the most popular Cuban rhythms. This dynamic audiovisual package features an exciting procession of testimonies, great Afro-Cuban jams, and colloquial jokes. Artists featured include Maestro Chico O'Farrill, José Fajardo, Juan Pablo Torres, Alfredo Valdés Jr., Cándido Camero, Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez, Israel Kantor, Malena Burke, David Oquendo, Vicente Sánchez, Aguedo Valdés-Luna, Carlos y Marta, Ulices Del Toro, Mirta Gómez, Paquito Hechavarría, Nelson "El Flaco" Padrón, Armando López, Art Farmer, Super Son Cubano, Los Santos, and Raices Habaneras. (73 minutes)

"Holding on to Jah" is a film about the history and culture of Reggae music and the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, as told by Reggae musicians and historians. The Rastafarians share personal stories of the merging of the Rasta ideology with music that combined island and African rhythms, and how songs from people like Bob Marley, The Congos, Israel Vibration, Culture, and others, have brought forth a positive message. The film takes viewers on a journey to the heart of the Rasta movement and shows us how a message of salvation and redemption was born. (1:36:06)