This City of Mine: an Ever-Relevant Depiction of Navigating Kingston's Transport System
Jamaican short film This City of Mine was released at the 2017 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. We watched it for the first time a full two years later. Yet, every moment protagonist Julia, portrayed by actor Shanique Brown, endured felt like it was made to reflect the nightmarish conditions women of Kingston who rely on the city's public transportation must navigate today, in 2019.
Julia is starting her first day of work. After worrying about being late while waiting for the JUTC bus, she is encouraged to take alternate forms of transportation. On her journey, she is verbally assaulted and physically threatened.
We speak with writer/director Danielle Russell about the making and significance of the film's story. She shares who she wanted to reach and why:
"The main goal was to educate people that do these things [harass and assault women] that it does actually affect people and this is what it feels like. I wanted to put them in the shoes of the person that this was happening to."
Russell plunges the viewer in and out of esoteric black scenes that focuses attention on the uneasy feeling that's building. The feeling is deep, and “not just reflect Julia’s state of mind, but it was also supposed to reflect a side of Kingston that we don’t stop and observe. It’s kind of like the upside down in Stranger Things. Things are kind of twisted. Things look normal but there is something kind of off kilter about it. It [the black scenes] was supposed to kind of give you an eerie feeling like you’re almost in a horror movie.”
It's a horror that appears normalized and embedded into a culture, but the cloud everyday harassment casts over the affected segment of the city's population is still very much heavy. Russell explains, "the second goal was to let women know that other people are feeling this way. At the time I made it, it kind of seemed like people were brushing off these incidents as a cultural slip, a thing that people do. Like it was nothing, people made a joke and they just don’t realize. But I figured if I felt a type a way about it, maybe other women felt some type of way about it but they were kind of just not in the position to say anything. I wanted to target women and let them know, it’s ok to feel a way about it. It’s ok to say something about it, and even if you don’t want to say something about it, just letting them know that there are other women out there going through this, so you do have support".
Solidarity does shine through when Julia interacts with other women in the film. The Woman on JUTC / Yellow Bus (Ingrid Coore) holds Julia's hand at the end of the film and she witnesses the Feisty Young Woman in Half-Way-Tree (Robyn Edwards) defend herself against similar harassment from a conductor. We spoke briefly about how the Woman at Bus Stop (Donna Evelyn) calls Julia "pretty girl" a few times as she attempts to help Julia get to work on time. "Even though the women are also buying into this thing about calling other women by names that talk about their physical being, there is still a kind of unspoken connection between them and it’s kind of like they’re really only using these terms because that’s what they know and they really don’t see anything wrong with it”, Russell says.
The acceptance of less than ideal situations extends to how other characters, and many real life Kingstonians, come to accept (wilfully or not) the broken transportation system. Russell's third major goal for This City of Mine "was to address policy makers to ask them to do something about the transportation system".
Today, the system mirrors all the same issues in the film. Russell wrote the script from the position of a keen observer with fresh eyes after returning from time away from the country. She shares, “essentially, I was kind of writing a little bit of me in Julia. I had gone away for four years from Jamaica and came back and because I was out of the culture for so long, I was just super observant about everything. And so, I kinda wrote Julia as someone who was not used to this environment. So, she just didn’t know how to deal with these things because nobody had ever said those things to her or push up on her and she wasn’t sure how to react. She also wasn’t sure how serious these things were. Like, 'were they being serious, were they not being serious'?”
The confusion and fear folks like Julia faces often turns into hopelessness and apathy when suffered long enough. Laws are changing but realities aren't. Violence among operators is shutting down the city, holding working citizens hostage. Families are being torn apart. Fear is building. Will This City of Mine continue to represent a tale that never fades? Or can we revisit it two years from now as history rather than reality?
As members of the Diaspora, we don't always get a chance to consume Caribbean film as they're released. The b/dscvrd team is catching up on what we've missed, watching Caribbean film on Studio Anansi TV. In our "We're Watching" series, we celebrate great film performances by Caribbean actors. Watch This City of Mine on Studio Anansi TV.
Photo courtesy of Danielle Russell. Connect with Danielle on Twitter and Instagram, watch her work on Vimeo.
