Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

Esi signs a deal and plans for two May appearances in Brampton Barbados slave saga soon moving from books to our TV By Stephen Weir Washington Black is not going away soon. In fact the story of the young Barbados slave who ends up travelling the world, will be coming to television, now that the rights to Esi Edugyan’s award winning novel have just been purchased by Hollywood! Edugyan’s Washington Black was truly the book of the year in Canada last year and is now proving to a world-beater in sales. It won the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for both the prestigious UK Man Booker Prize and Canada’s 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction honours. Washington Black is the story of George Washington Black; an eleven-year-old field slave living on a Barbados sugar plantation. From the brutal cane plantations to the icy waters of the Canadian Arctic, from the mud-filled streets of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, Washington Black is the t...

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, f...