SARGASSO! A CARIBBEAN LOVE STORY

category: caribbean, feature films, guyana, narratives

SARGASSO! A CARIBBEAN LOVE STORY

Dominican writer Jean Rhys's celebrated novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, tells the story of the mad creole heiress in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. "SARGASSO: A CARIBBEAN LOVE STORY," is a contemporary response to this classic novel through the medium of film. While it captures the spirit of the original modernist text, the visual realization creates new meanings of its own. In particular, the island setting is presented as indivisible from drama, providing an antidote to the Hollywood fantasy of the Caribbean as an exotic island paradise. A University of the West Indies pilot project, Sargasso! was filmed in Dominica with an all Caribbean cast and crew. The director, Guayanese dramatist and respected academic, Michael Gilkes, pays tribute to Jean Rhys in a voice-over introduction to the film.

directed by MICHAEL GILKES
Michael Gilkes is a distinguished Caribbean critic, dramatist and former lecturer at several Universities, and more recently a filmmaker.
His critical work includes ‘Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (1975)’; ‘The Literate Imagination (1989)’, which is also about Harris; and ‘The West Indian Novel, Twayne’.
His play, ‘Couvade’, was published by Cape in 1974, while ‘A Pleasant Career’, a play about the life and work of Edgar Mittelholzer, won the prestigious Guyana Prize for Drama in 1992. ‘Joanstown’ won the 2002 Guyana Prize for best book of poetry. He won the 2006 Guyana Prize for drama with his play, ‘The Last of the Redmen’.

DOMINICA/GUYANA || 1992 || 47 MINS