BRUK OUT FILM FOR JAMAICA DANCE HALL MOVEMENT
Canadian debut at
Toronto’s Royal Cinema
By Stephen Weir
It took four years and a worldwide
Kickstarter project for the Jamaica Dance Hall documentary Bruk Out to Break
Out in Toronto. On Friday night the movie was given its Canadian premiere to a wildly
cheering audience at the downtown Royal Cinema.
 |
| The Caribbean Camera |
Bruk Out – starts with the real
thing. Men and women dancing in the streets and steamy dance halls of Kingston,
Jamaica with reckless abandon. Men and
women flaunt their sexuality, on the dance floor, in the streets of Kingston
and even on the hoods of slow moving cars. Wining? That is too tame for Dance Hall – this
is where the term daggering was born.
The
camera rolls with a clubber’s point of view of the hot hot dancing, while notable
dancehall artists including Beenie Man and Elephant Man explain how the music
and dancing feed off each other.
The 69-minute movie moves from the
ghetto to America, Poland and Spain, following six women with no connection to
the Kingston club scene. They are non-stop rehearsing as they get ready to blow
their life savings and compete for Jamaica’s 2014 Million Dollar (JA) Dance
Hall Queen competition.
These are women obsessed
with the vibrant underbelly of Jamaican dance. It leads them to conquer body
issues, poverty, domestic abuse and the struggles of being a single mother, all
while keeping their eyes on winning the biggest prize in Dancehall.
 |
| Bee Quammie and Anthony Berot at the Royal Cinema premiere |
“To me, this movie is all about women finding their freedom. I
used Bruk Out! - meaning to break free or get crazy on the dance floor - as a
way to remind people that at the end of the day, these women need those moments
of pure self-expression to find their freedom,” explains director Cori Wapnowska.
Wapnowska, a white
American moviemaker, says she first learned about Jamaican dance while living in
New York. “In a Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn, and every summer I see the
dancing at the West Indies Day Parade. I got fascinated and started to do research
on where the dances came from and the meaning behind them. “
Four
years after the outdoor Dance Hall Queen competition was held, Wapnowska’s heavily subtitled film finally
began to be shown at film festivals in Europe, the Caribbean, America and now
Canada. Friday’s showing was organized by the Toronto based Caribbean Tales
Film Festival (CTFF)
The CTFF went head-to-head with the cross-town 6th
annual Toronto Black Film Festival.
On the same night the Black Film Festival was screening four films in two
downtown theatres and had a musical performance by Jamaica’s Warrior Love
Band. Bruk
Out showed well, filling every single one of the Royal Cinema’s 390 seats!
One
of the best things about the Friday night screening of the Jamaica Dance Hall
Queen documentary "Bruk Out" was Bee Quammie's introduction of the
film. The Toronto based film journalist and popular cultural spokesperson told
a packed Royal Theatre that Bruk Out is all about the empowerment of the Dance
Hall movement in Jamaica (and around the world).
 |
| movie still |
“I
wasn't directly involved in the making of the film - I heard about it a few
years back when they were crowd-funding to finish it off, and I actually
interviewed the filmmaker and Famous Red,
one of the dancehall queens in the film.”
“I really enjoyed the film,” said Bee Quammie. “I loved the
expanse of emotion - I laughed, I cheered, I felt proud, I was moved to tears -
and feel like it offered a great window through which we could see the
motivations of the women and what made them passionate about dancehall. I
definitely think it's a
 |
| Bruk Out at the Royal - photo Anthony Berot |
Comments