This weekend, the Community Folk Art Center in Syracuse will celebrate the arts of the Caribbean — a culture that can often go unnoticed in central New York.

The Caribbean Cinematic Festival is a four-day festival that highlights Caribbean culture through film screenings, dance, spoken word performances, Caribbean cuisine, workshops and post-film discussions. The festival will take place Thursday to Sunday.

The idea for the festival came from the former executive director of the Community Folk Art Center, who wanted to make an event in addition to the center’s monthly musical series, “Journey Through Music of the African Diaspora.” The Community Folk Art Center regularly holds exhibitions, film screenings and workshops that celebrate the artists of the African Diaspora.

Tamar Smithers, the center’s director of education, said the festival is a way of bringing the Spanish, French and English-speaking communities together through film.

“We wanted to create an event that would bring the university community together with the greater Syracuse community and what better way to do that than with a film festival that highlights the Caribbean,” Smithers said. “I don’t think that that is done or it’s not showcased as much as it should be in central New York.”

The festival kicks off Thursday at 6 p.m. with a performance by Syracuse University Raices Dance Troup and a small reception with Latin cuisine. Afterwards, there will be a screening of “200 Cartas,” a romantic comedy from Puerto Rico that stars actor Lin-Manuel Miranda. Other featured films consist of narratives and documentaries from a variety of islands, including Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Lucia. The festival ends on Sunday with a Caribbean-style brunch catered by Jerk Hut, followed by screenings of three short films.

SU’s Kalabash Dance Troupe and Haitian poet Ray Sunshine are also set to perform at the festival.

Cecilia Green, associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University, has been involved with the festival as a member of the board of directors of Community Folk Art Center for three years. Green, who is from the Caribbean herself, has helped with getting film for the festival through her connections with the Caribbean Studies Association.

With the theme of music this year, the festival will showcase several documentaries about music, including two from Jamaica — “The Legend of Ska,” which focuses on the music genre ska, the precursor to reggae music, and “Songs of Redemption,” a film about inmates in Jamaica involved in a music rehabilitation program. They will also be showing a cult classic from Jamaica, “Harder They Come,” a crime film about the music industry.

This year, Green looks forward to building an audience for the festival and the films of the Caribbean. With annual film festivals growing in the Caribbean, including ones in Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica, Green hopes to showcase the rising film industry of the Caribbean islands.

“We want to make people aware of this sort of location within the African diaspora, the Caribbean, which is so close to us,” Green said. “And to let people know that in fact, it has a growing and very vibrant film industry.”

In recent years, the Caribbean film industry has been gaining international recognition — distribution companies have showcased Caribbean film through film festivals in places like Toronto.

Showcasing and celebrating Caribbean culture and history through film is also what the festival hopes to accomplish, Smithers said.

“It’s an opportunity for people of Caribbean descent who are living in the area to be able to enjoy their heritage,” Smithers said. “It’s also to provide an opportunity to showcase the beauty and the richness of Caribbean culture for people who may not have been exposed to it or haven’t been able to experience it.”

“Cu-Bop,” a documentary about the roots of Cuban jazz, will also be showing at the festival. Smithers is looking forward to watching the documentary, in part because the director of the film, Shinichi Takahashi, will be traveling from Japan to attend the festival. Takahashi is set to facilitate the post-film discussions, where people can discuss topics that deal with “provocative topics that deal with social justice issues,” Smithers said.

In addition to the post-film discussions, Smithers is especially excited about reaching the fifth year for the festival. She also hopes for an increase in attendance among the Syracuse community.

“I’m definitely looking forward to seeing everyone attend the screenings, hearing the in-depth discussions, so I look forward to everything,” Smithers said. “But every year I look forward to growth— I definitely want to see this into its 10th annual and 15th annual.”

Green said this festival celebrates the multicultural society of the United States by showcasing films from multiple language regions of the Caribbean. In the past, the festival featured films from the Dominican Republic, the U.K. and the Bahamas.

“We try to develop a global, cultural imagination, which I think is really important, not just in terms of cultivating a multicultural cultural consciousness, but also cultivating tolerance,” Green said. “I think art is one of the greatest ways of cultivating global tolerance among people.”

Published on February 22, 2017 at 10:10 pm