Life and Debt

Stephanie Black’s provocative, resonant documentary fingers globalization and such institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for decimating the island’s agriculture and industry infrastructure, and replacing colonialism and empty government coffers with economic bondage. She pieces together a sort of Globalization for Dummies that identifies and simplifies economic policies that are supposed to benefit the Jamaican populace and then builds a case that they do not. This debatable but very fluid analysis of the “mechanism of debt” and a “new world order of trade” explores the social and moral costs attached to the aggressive tentacles of Big Business. The voice-over narration, adapted from Jamaica Kincaid’s 1987 nonfiction book A Small Place (which dissects life on Antigua), laces us up in tourist shoes and then escorts us behind the tropical beauty and façades of encouraged hedonism into a land convulsing from growing pains and financial crisis.