Bad Friday

Director: Deborah Thomas, John L. Jackson, Jnr
2011, Jamaica
English and Jamaican Creole, with English subtitles
Documentary feature / 68 minutes

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Bad Friday focuses on a community of Rastafarians in the Montego Bay area of Jamaica who annually commemorate the 1963 Coral Gardens “incident”, when the Jamaican government rounded up, jailed and tortured hundreds of Rastafarians. Using the testimony of survivors, the film chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community, and shows how people use their recollections of past traumas to imagine new possibilities for the future.

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Deborah A. Thomas is Professor and Chair of the Graduate Group in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the author of Modern Blackness:  Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica, and co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race:  Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Thomas was also a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.

John L. Jackson, Jr is Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.  He has produced several fiction and non-fiction films, features and shorts.  He is the author of Harlemworld:  Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America, Real Black:  Adventures in Racial Sincerity, and Racial Paranoia:  The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness.

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Tue 27 Sept 2.00pm + Mon 03 Oct 12.00pm, MovieTowne