Flores, Little Jamaica
Maude Katz
2016 - 50 min - Video Full HD - Couleur - Suisse

Riding motorcycles, listening to syncopated rhythms, dancing at the "Paradise" bar and the colours red, yellow and green: in this film we are going to meet the protagonists of the reggae scene of Labuan Bajo on Flores, an island in the East of Indonesia.
The fact that a type of music specific to one place could touch a distant listener has always intrigued me. When I met young people of my generation who were fans of reggae music at Flores, a small island in the Eastern part of Indonesia, I wondered what this could well mean. They were reproducing Bob Marley’s titles, imitating his look and adopting his slogans and way of life. Knowing that Labuan Bajo, a small town on the coast where the film was shot, is geographically, economically and culturally very far away from Jakarta, the capital, and from the more industrialized island of Java, this love for a type of music specific to an island eventually gaining an international status may not just be a coincidence… Indonesia is a huge archipelago consisting of more than ten thousand islands. Before it was colonized, a great number of more or less competitive kingdoms coexisted. When it became independent, the nationalists claimed the territory created by the Dutch colonization, imposed a national union and largely centralized that country made of numerous cultures, languages and religions. As the meetings with the young Floresians progress in the film, the set of problems which that small Eastern island and that generation face up to will reveal themselves…