St. John, USVI – The Gri Gri Project at Bajo El Sol Gallery in Mongoose Junction is launching its series of regularly scheduled film screenings this month.
All screenings will begin at 7 pm at the gallery, which is upstairs above Hot Look Sunglasses and Sun Dog Café. Seating is limited, so arrive early.
Freshly popped popcorn, locally-made Belgian Chocolate Factory chocolates and refreshments will be offered for sale. Tickets are pay as you can; a donation of between one and 20 dollars is recommended to cover the costs of the screenings.
On Thursday, Dec. 8, the gallery will host the world premiere of Wider Angle Productions’ “It Ain’t Easy Being Green.” Complementary champagne and popcorn will be served.
Filmed on St. John, “It Ain’t Easy Being Green” is a half hour documentary about the island’s dramatic increase in green iguanas over the last few decades, and the different reactions their presence gets from visitors, long-time residents and natural resource managers.
Can the island’s two and four-legged creatures peacefully co-exist? The questions posed by the film are critical to communities around the world as ecosystems continue to change dramatically, leaving humans and non-human animals left wondering what to do to adapt.
“It Ain’t Easy Being Green” was directed and produced by environmental anthropologist Crystal Fortwangler and filmmaker Ziggy Livnat. Bajo El Sol artist Bill Stelzer worked on the project as director of photography and creative partner. Filmmakers will be on hand to answer questions.
There will be an encore showing of “It Ain’t Easy Being Green” on Friday, Dec. 9.
On Thursday, Dec. 22, The Gri Gri Project invites you to attend the USVI premiere of John Akomfrah’s “The Stuart Hall Project.”
John Akomfrah is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose “commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films”.
“The Stuart Hall Project” is Akomfrah’s documentary and visual poem about the work of Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall, whose engagement with issues of hybridity and the complexity of identity profoundly shaped British cultural studies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Hall’s scholarship and activism has been influential in shaping the politics of the Caribbean Diaspora in the U.K. and Europe, and creolization and globalization studies.
Sight & Sound magazine’s Ashley Clark described “The Stuart Hall Project” as “a strongly personal work that unfolds simultaneously as a tribute to a heroic figure, a study of the emergence of the New Left and its attendant political ideas, and a summation, in thematic and technical terms, of the key characteristics of Akomfrah’s body of work thus far (intertextuality, archival manipulation, a focus on postcolonial and diasporic discourse in Britain).”
Attendees of December’s screenings will still have the chance to check out the Gri Gri Project’s most recent exhibition “New Vernaculars” featuring works by Ensor Colon, Deborah St. Clair, Eric Browne, Jon Euwema, Cooper Penn and Bill Stelzer.
The Gri Gri project consists of Bajo El Sol’s new owners, Priscilla Hintz Rivera Knight and David Knight Jr.
