December 6–13, 2001

movie shorts

Life and Debt

by Cindy Fuchs

recommended

"You see yourself. You see yourself." As you hear these words in Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt, you see a montage of touristy images: lovely Jamaican hotel room linens, a balcony view of a perfect beach, perfectly tanned foreigners, even a wedding between a couple of tourists set against a backdrop of perfectly blue surf. Everything is pretty, just as you’d expect when you’ve paid good money for your vacation package.

But by the time this travel-brochure-ish sequence appears, some 15 minutes into the documentary, it’s hard to feel impressed by the luxury you’re looking at, much less hear Jamaica Kincaid’s accusatory narration (adapted from her nonfiction book A Small Place and read by Belinda Becker). For by now, you’ve seen a little too much evidence that globalization — with help from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and U.S. corporations and "free trade" policies — has decimated Jamaica’s economy. By now, you’ve seen the dire discrepancies between lovely vacation haven Montego Bay and Kingston, where Jamaican sweatshop workers provide tax-free labor, at $30 a week, for companies like Tommy Hilfiger and Hanes; or between once-successful dairy, chicken and banana farmers, now ruined by American powdered milk and chicken imports, and Chiquita and Dole produce. The Chiquita debacle included a police rout of workers attempting to strike in 1993, during which some 23 people were killed.

If you’re a tourist, however, you see no such disturbances. Tourism is one of the country’s few remaining viable industries (along with coffin manufacturing and guard-dog training). Instead, on the bus to the hotel, you pass Baskin-Robbins and McDonald’s and Burger King, you see "natives" who, as Kincaid describes them, are "squatting by the side of the road… hanging out with all the time in the world"; but as explained by former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley — who was elected on an anti-IMF platform in 1976, then forced, by lack of alternatives, to sign agreements in 1977 — they’re only idle because they’re put out of work by years of brutal international tax and tariff structures and labor laws.

Much like Black’s previous documentary, H-2 Worker (a 1989 look at the exploitation of Caribbean sugar cane workers), Life and Debt argues its case aggressively, never even pretending to be "objective." Shot in part by Spike Lee cinematographer Malik Sayeed (Clockers ), the film juxtaposes harsh and lovely images (rioting and poverty alongside reggae music and shots of Rasta men talking politics and spirituality), and interviews with Manley and the IMF’s Stanley Fischer, who deploys standard diplomatic doublespeak: "In an IMF program, there’ll be some assumptions about the way interest rates will go," i.e., these will be imposed on the borrower, in order to best serve the lending institution.

To make its case, the film also includes a necessarily brief history lesson, with archival footage and political speeches, intercut with scenes showing the devastating results of the accumulating national debt: At present, Jamaica owes $4.7 billion to various lending agencies. It’s a sad, terrible picture, not the way you want to see yourself reflected at all.

(Ritz at the Bourse)