Jamaicans ‘Open Doors’ at Locarno Film Festival

Jamaican film-makers Nadean Rawlins and Rebecca Williams will be making their debuts as part of this year’s Locarno Film Festival’s Open Doors selection for its 2022-2024 focus, which will champion developing film projects, talents and completed films from the Caribbean and Latin America.

Rawlins, of RAW Management, is the first Jamaican producer to participate in its acclaimed Creative Producers’ Lab. This is a training workshop for creative producers with feature film projects to aid in developing skill sets as an individual creative producer, as well as to aid with the development of their project. For Rawlins, her submitted feature film project in development is Fallen Angel and the Devil Concubine, based on the two-hander Jamaican play of the same name.

Locarno’s team also selected eight other producers from St Lucia, Haiti, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Peru. The participants have commenced virtual workshops and, in early August, will be fully sponsored to take part in person at the core Open Doors Producers’ Lab workshops at the 75th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. The training programme combines group discussions, screenings, individual consultancy meetings and networking opportunities with industry decision-makers and festival guests.

Locarno Open Doors will also feature a special non-competitive screening of select films from the Caribbean and Latin America that are representative of the region. Out of Many, by writer-director Rebecca Williams, will be the first Jamaican short to screen at the Open Doors Screening at the Piazza Grande of the Locarno Film Festival. Out of Many, which explores the pervasive social disparity in Kingston, Jamaica, from the perspective of a teenage girl, will screen at the festival on August 5. Williams’ first short film has previously been screened to acclaim both locally, regionally and internationally.

In a 20-year-long collaboration with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation within the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Open Doors has cast a spotlight on talents and films from countries where independent cinema is more fragile.

The ultimate goal of the Locarno Open Doors programme is to contribute to the development of a more collaborative worldwide film community without borders while making the independent scene stronger and more sustainable locally, regionally and globally.