The Caribbean Film Series returns to the Brooklyn Film Festival, and the official selection to open the event is “Right Near the Beach,” directed by and starring Gibrey Allen, who was also in attendance with a post-screening Q&A on April 27 at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
In Allen’s “Right Near the Beach” the film focuses on a prominent Jamaican sprinter, Jeffery Jacobs, who is found brutally and mysteriously murdered. Rumors about a secret life he may have lived, create a public uproar, causing obstructions to the murder investigation, and torment for Jeffery’s normally placid father, who seeks justice for his son.
“Right Near the Beach” takes a hard look at homophobia in Jamaica set against a backdrop of beautiful vistas and it does not treat the murder as a voyeuristic mystery, but rather the film
challenges audiences to contemplate the agony of loss instead of debating the value of one person’s life.
The co-producer of The Caribbean Film Series and executive director of The Luminal Theater, Curtis Caesar John, says this: “What Gibrey Allen does with ‘Right Near the Beach’ is portray what in less capable hands would be a predictable ‘ripped from the headlines’ story and treats it both politically and sensitively.”
The film is preceded by Nelson Foix’s short film “Timoun Aw” (Your Kid). For audiences, tickets are currently available for purchase at BAM.org. Following the film screening, there will be a talkback featuring the film’s director Gibrey Allen moderated by writer/editor/film curator Dessane Lopez Cassell.
Now in its seventh year, the Caribbean Film Series is an ongoing program of Third Horizon, the result of the merger between the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Luminal Theater, Brooklyn-based Caribbean Film Academy, and Miami-based Third Horizon Media, an award-winning creative collective dedicated to developing, producing, exhibiting, and distributing film and other art forms that give voice to stories of the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other marginalized and underrepresented spaces in the Global South.
The Luminal Theater (2015) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation. LT is a nomadic cinema that due to the arts being underserved in too many urban and rural communities, brings Black films straight to the people.
They provide fully-curated exhibitions of diverse and complex cinema and media of the Black/African diaspora, allowing these artists to present their work within our unique brand of shared audience experiences, presented in majority-Black communities across the United States and virtually.
For more information, visit www.bam.org.