Must-See Belafonte film to open CaribbeanTales 2012 Film Festival

The second in a 3-part series in which documentarist and screenwriter Wenty Bowen, explains why SING YOUR SONG is a must see for Caribbean and especially for Barbadian, audiences. Read Part 1 here. 

SING YOUR SONG will have its Barbados premiere as the Opening Night Gala at the CaribbeanTales 2012 Film Festival at Frank Collymore Hall on April 11th at 6pm.

Tickets are on sale from CaribbeanTales-events.com for $20 Bdos until March 31st ($35 at the door)

EARLY DAYS

According to Wikipedia, Belafonte was born into a rough Harlem neighbourhood on March 1, 1927 to Melvine (née Love) – a housekeeper (of Jamaican descent) – and Harold George Bellanfanti, Sr., a Martiniquan who worked as a chef in the Royal Navy. His father abandoned the family fairly early. As Belafonte writes in his recent book My Song: A Memoir, it was a hard start.

“I was born into poverty, grew up in poverty, and for a long time poverty was all I thought I’d know.” His immigrant mother sent him to be raised in her native Jamaica in an effort to ensure his safety. There he lived with his grandmother from 1932 to 1940, and developed a cultural reservoir on which to build future artistic success.

Questioned about how growing up in Jamaica influenced Belafonte'’s outlook on life and social justice, Rostock told an HBO interviewer, “Musically, it affected him. And also seeing the poverty, how hard the workers worked and how difficult life was for them. But what really got him committed to social justice was his mother, seeing how hard it was for her here working in America. She used to say to him, "Never go to sleep at night, never let a day go by without showing some concern and doing something to change the course of events." She fed that to him from the beginning.”

Belafonte himself says, “My mother was an immigrant woman seeking to participate in the American dream. She discovered that the ground rules for people of colour were not the same as the ground rules for people who came from Europe. I grew up appreciating her resilience and courage. She felt our mission in life was to stand up to oppression wherever we saw it, and never surrender until we have done what we can to change it. So to a great extent that was my first inoculation, the first thing that got to me.”

Upon the outbreak of World War II, he returned to Harlem and in 1944, at 17, he enlisted in the Navy, serving for almost two years as a munitions loader. While there he discovered the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

ACTING

Two years later, out of the navy, he was working as a janitor's assistant in NYC when a tenant gave him 2 tickets to a play at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, which gave black actors roles and opportunities denied them elsewhere. He also met Sidney Poitier, from the Bahamas. The financially struggling pair regularly purchased a single seat to local plays, trading places in between acts, after informing the other about the progression of the play. He fell in love with the art form, and so. at the end of the 1940s, he joined the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research in New York under the tutelage of renowned German director Erwin Piscator, There he attended classes with fellow future stars like Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Rod Steiger, Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.

He found in the theatre “a place of social truth and profound influence,” and he resolved to use art not simply to inspire others, but also as an instrument of resistance and rebellion and a counter to racism..

A MAN AND HIS MUSIC

As you know, Belafonte was not only an actor, he was also a singer who, because of his years in Jamaica, had learned the songs of the peasants and workers, enabling him to straddle cultures and musical styles, so that later, as the so called Calypso King, he made many Caribbean-themed songs famous. It is especially this aspect of the Belafonte story that West Indians will resonate to, and that will make “Sing Your Song” a must-see film for them. For many of the songs that made Belafonte rich and famous were written by another son of the Caribbean, Irving Burgie, who is linked to both Barbados and Jamaica.

The son of a Barbadian mother and American father, Irving Burgie is best known in the U.S. as the writer of such classic Calypso tunes as "Day-O" and "Jamaica Farewell". He was responsible for eight songs on Harry Belafonte's ground-breaking 1956 album "Calypso," which was the first LP in America to sell over one million copies. Burgie went on to write another twenty-eight songs recorded by Belafonte. Belafonte’s success, was attributed in great part to Burgie’s tremendously popular songs.

As one critic has observed, Belafonte “was one of the first performers to bring worldbeat rhythms to the U.S. charts in the postwar era, and his silky-smooth mixture of jazz, folk, pop, and art song, often with impossibly infectious West Indies-styled accompaniment, coupled with his charismatic good looks and easy, hip coolness and sharp racial and political sense meant he was never reduced to being a mere commodity, even though he spent his whole career on major labels. Innovative, intelligent, and unceasingly creative, Belafonte's unique ability to find pop success with artful and socially committed material means he is long overdue for a critical reappraisal, and 2011 may well provide that with the release of his autobiography, My Song, co-written with Michael Shnayerson, and an HBO documentary on his life, “Sing Your Song.” directed by Susan Rostock and produced by Michael Cohl."

Intelligent, confident and with a firm grasp of artful arrangement, Belafonte almost single handedly brought world music into the commercial pop arena with the Burgie-composed “Day-O” song, and in Burgie he had found the perfect songwriter, a man whose compositions had the lilt and flow of ocean sunlight itself. Several of Burgie’s songs (and Belafonte’s versions of them) have become stone cold classics, including “Banana Boat (Day-O),” the lovely “Jamaica Farewell” (both of which were centerpieces of 1956’s million-selling Calypso album that made Belafonte an international star) and “Kingston Market.”

In Part 3 of the series, Wenty Bowen describes how Belafonte  got involved with leading political figures, and became a beacon and catalyst for many of the key causes and issues of our time. 

EVENT DETAILS

 

Name: CaribbeanTales 2012 @ Island Inn - FIlm Festival, Symposium, Incubator

 

Date: April 10 - 15, 2012

 

Venue: Venues around Barbados: Island Inn, Aquatic Gap; Frank Collymore Hall, Bridgetown;

George Washington House; Olympus Cinemas, Sheraton Mall;

 

Tickets: CaribbeanTales-events.com

 

Media and Information : Frances-Anne Solomon, Director 266-7779; Nancii Yearwood,

CaribbeanTales@gmail.com.

 

ABOUT THE WRITER

Wenty Bowen is a documentary filmmaker and screenwriter. A former Fulbright Scholar, he was a Senior Lecturer at UWI Mona, where he taught Sociology, Journalism and Television Production at the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication. He was also Publications Editor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (now SALISAS) at UWI Mona. His feature articles have been published in newspapers in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Caribbean, and his television play about Jamaican National Hero Sam Sharpe as well as his cultural and news documentaries were broadcast by the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation.

About CaribbeanTales

The CaribbeanTales Film Festival @ Island Inn, Barbados is an important annual film event on the island, and a highlight of the regional cultural callendar ever since it was created in 2010; a multi-facetted forum that is focused not only on screening the best Caribbean films, but also on developing industry practitioners, creating networking opportunities, and on seeking solutions to challenges facing the sector as well as facilitating the marketing and distribution of indigenous film products.

 

CaribbeanTales 2012 @ Island Inn, Barbados is sponsored by: Andre Woodvine, Bajan Reporter, The Barbados Film and Video Association, the Barbados Tourism Association, Benjamin Drakes Photography, Blue Waters Productions, Bridgetown Film Academy, Caribbean Broadcasting Union, Caribbean Development Bank, Caribbean Media Corporation, Creative Junction, Frank Collymore Hall, Irebel Films, Island Inn, National Cultural Foundation, Olympus Cinemas, Seaweaver Productions, SFa Communications, St Nicholas Abbey Rum.

 

CaribbeanTales is a group of companies that produces, markets and exhibits Caribbean-themed films for regional and international distribution, including:  CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution, that links producers and buyers of quality entertainment; the CaribbeanTales Film Festival Group that produces annual events in Toronto, Barbados and New York;  the Caribbean Incubator Program for Audio Visual Entrepreneurs that delivers training for filmmakers, and CaribbeanTales.ca, a non profit based on Toronto, Canada, that promotes citizen participation through the medium of film.