BAM Hosts Highly effective Caribbean Movie Collection in Brooklyn
Brooklyn, New York’s BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), in partnership with The Luminal Theatre and Third Horizon, hosted a key version of the Caribbean Movie Collection. The 2-day occasion, held on October third–4th, introduced collectively movies that traverse colonial historical past, psychological well being, id, and energy, amplifying each diasporic and Francophone Caribbean views, in addition to African voices with Caribbean connections.
Featured Movie: True Chronicles of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital
The creative centrepiece of the pageant was True Chronicles of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital within the Final Century, a 2024 fiction characteristic directed by Abdenour Zahzah. The movie provides an in-depth have a look at the interval when Dr. Frantz Fanon served as head of the Fifth Ward on the Blida-Joinville Hospital, between 1953 and 1956.
Set in colonial Algeria in 1953, the movie recounts how a younger Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique, is appointed head physician at a hospital entrenched in colonial racial segregation. Muslim and Christian wards are divided, and remedy practices, significantly within the Muslim unit, are deeply inhumane. Fanon introduces group therapies, empowers employees with larger tasks, opens communal areas (a café, a soccer pitch), and works to revive dignity to sufferers.
The movie is 90 minutes lengthy, in Arabic and French with English subtitles and provided a very broad view of historic Caribbean storytelling.
Themes & Relevance
True Chronicles… is compelling due to its intertwining of colonial violence, psychological well being, humanising interventions, and ethical braveness. Fanon’s experiments with institutional psychotherapy are sometimes mentioned in tutorial circles however this movie dramatises them, bringing actuality to ideas like trauma, alienation, and therapeutic.
It additionally supplies Francophone Caribbean viewers, and broader diaspora audiences, a chance to interact with a thinker whose roots lie in Martinique and whose affect on anti-colonial thought, postcolonial psychiatry, revolutionary concept continues to resonate. Particularly in moments when id, race, and psychological well being are every day public conversations, this movie provides each historic grounding and emotive energy.
Standout Screening: Kouté vwa (Take heed to the Voices)
One other standout screening from the pageant was Kouté vwa (Take heed to the Voices), the debut feature-length movie by Maxime Jean-Baptiste. It was beforehand proven on the Open Metropolis Documentary Competition in London, UK, earlier this yr.
The movie follows Melrick, a teenage boy spending the summer time in French Guiana along with his grandmother, Nicole. By their conversations, the tragic circumstances surrounding the demise of Nicole’s son, Lucas Diomar, who was murdered 11 years earlier, slowly unfold.
The Luminal Theater’s promotional materials emphasised a Francophone focus, showcasing multilingual movies that problem audiences by way of French, English, and Creole narratives.
A Curated Collaboration with Neighborhood at Its Coronary heart
This collaboration between BAM, Third Horizon, and The Luminal Theatre reveals each institutional help and curatorial care. The movies chosen for screening weren’t supposed for passive viewing, however for energetic engagement, sparking dialog and providing publicity to tales which can be hardly ever amplified in mainstream cinema.
For Brooklyn and by extension, the bigger Caribbean diaspora communities this was a particular alternative to collect, replicate, and join over movie hardly ever featured or highlighted.
Pushing the Dialogue Ahead
This can be a marker that the Caribbean Movie Collection continues to evolve, not solely representing Caribbean life, but additionally pushing into dialogues about colonial legacies, psychological well being, and international intersections. The tales on display screen are deeply native in some methods, but they resonate far past our borders.