Life And Debt Details

It's impossible to watch this documentary about the impact of globalisation on Jamaica without a rising sense of dismay. Director Stephanie Black refuses to pull her punches, and why should she when she's got so much damning evidence at her disposal? Yet for all the eloquence of former Prime Minister Michael Manley and the local labourers betrayed by faceless multinational fat cats and the International Monetary Fund, it's the extracts from Jamaica Kincaid's book, A Small Place, that make the most telling impact. Heard over images of a tourist party enjoying the banal pleasures of freedom, Kincaid's spare prose brings home the terrible hidden cost of foreign industry and so-called “loans”. Angry agitprop this may be, but it's irresistibly persuasive.

This impassioned polemical diatribe addresses the fate of the Jamaican economy. The island was freed from British... read more on Time Out