Friday, March 31, 2:00pm
Student Union Movie Theater, UNC Charlotte Main Campus
Director Kevin Kennedy
Jamaica, 2016, 50 minutes
Documentary in English
Sponsored by the UNC Charlotte German Club
A question and answer session with the director will follow. Jamaican documentary filmmaker Dr. Kevin Kennedy is a faculty member in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Appalachian State University. He has directed several films in German and English: Von Essen zum Brot. Eine Geschichte deutscher Immigranten, 2005; Peter Paul Zahl – German Exile Writer in Jamaica, 2007; Goethe in Jamaica, 2007; Eine Geschichte der Deutsch-Jamaikanischen Gesellschaft, 2008; German Enemy Aliens in the Land of the Sky, 2012; Germans in Jamaica. War, Spies and Camps, 2016
As countless other stories begin, this one, too, begins with Hitler’s rise to power on January 30, 1933. Very few nations, if any at all, were not affected by the consequences of Hitler’s insane actions. Hitler himself had correctly prophesized that those who were against him would never be happy, even if they fled to the “end” of the world. Though this story does not take us to the end of the world, it brings us close. Of all the hundred thousands of Germans who either fled Germany or those who were working or living abroad after 1933, a few thousand found refuge in various internment camps on the island of Jamaica.
This documentary describes how Jamaica became a safe haven for those Germans, either living in the Island, or those rounded up by the British in West Africa, or captured on the high seas, while tracing the lives of 4 families who survived the transfer from Africa and detailing their daily lives during internment in Jamaica from 1939 – 1946.
The documentaty had its first screening at the Jamaica Film Festival in Frankfurt, Germany, in November 2016.
