Woman on the verge - Filmmaker Rebecca Williams wants to expand Jamaica’s film repertoire
Published:Sunday | June 30, 2024 | 12:08 AMOmar Tomlinson - Contributor
Come August, emerging Jamaican filmmaker Rebecca ‘becx’ Williams is headed to Switzerland for the Locarno Film Festival where she will pitch her script for an island-set, horror-folklore story which she hopes to turn into a movie. “I will be attending the Open Doors programme there to pitch my idea. The programme is part of the film festival where they host Latin American and Caribbean filmmakers and engage them in workshops. I am looking to get development guidance and speak to producers,” explained Williams, the sole English-speaking Caribbean national set to participate in the weeklong event founded in 1946. Other directors attending will hail from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela.
A film and television graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia, United States, and Oxford University in the United Kingdom, the latter where she pursued a master’s degree in creative writing, Williams is laying the groundwork to fulfil her big-screen directorial ambitions. “It’s a horror-folklore movie set in Jamaica in the fictional, very rural town called the Periphery. Some parts of it are inspired by the Mount View, St Jago community I grew up in. It’s about two cousins who come together in the summer to replace their grandfather’s tombstone and, as they go about doing that, they mess with the spiritual balance of the town,” she detailed of the plot line for her self-penned film script, which has the working title, The Periphery, and nods to local superstitions. For the 25-year-old filmmaker and writer, Jamaica figures prominently as both location and inspiration for the stories she wants to capture on celluloid.
Under her belt is a fast-expanding show reel that includes her 2020 short film Out of Many – a rumination on Jamaican youth and privilege – which made rounds on the film festival circuit Stateside in Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, and across the region in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Martinique and Grenada. There are, too, two commercial shoots last year for the Canadian clothing brand 4YE and the English streetwear brand Sharkkini. Also, the music video she directed for reggae artiste Protoje’s Self Defense in 2021, and her latest work yet: portraits she shot in Bull Bay for a teen VOGUE feature on in-demand Caribbean stylists published online last month.
The road to ‘lights, camera, action!’ for Williams began in the theatre with her childhood fascination with the backstage goings-on during time spent performing in productions while attending St Hugh’s Preparatory and, later, Hillel Academy. “I really loved a dress rehearsal. I was really interested in behind the scenes, and the people who were doing the lighting and the props,” she explained. Then, there was a steady diet of the small screen in her adolescence, particularly of the North American variety, that deepened her artistic curiosity. “I watched a lot of television, my parents probably wouldn’t like me saying that,” she admitted with a hearty laugh. “My dad loves television and movies. I always say he is the perfect audience member because he will honestly give anything a chance. We watched a lot of the TV comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live together, and Jay Leno as well. He enjoys late-night TV and exposed me to a lot of classic films like Kill Bill,” Williams reminisced of time with father, Alexander Williams, Jamaica’s high commissioner to London. But what made her consider a career behind the camera, however, was being creatively stirred by the Christopher Nolan-helmed sci-fi film Interstellar in 2014. “It is probably every young filmmaker’s movie. When I watched it, I cried, and thought I would love to make a movie like this. It was such a huge scope of a movie.”
Williams shared that she has also found favour with black and female directors Barry Jenkins, Mati Diop, Sofia Coppola and Dee Rees. “They are very influential [on] my style. I love Sofia’s colour palette. Her movies look like what teenage girlhood really felt like for me and a lot of other women. I also think she explores a lot of nuance in femininity coupled with sadness, depression and confusion. It’s not a glorified look at femininity but a real one that shows the dull bits as well. With Dee Rees, her film Pariah was such a great feat of cinema, the fact she was able to make such a great movie with such a small budget and it being one of her first films, it’s something I aspire to do with my first film.” Her parents were fully on board when she expressed a desire to pursue filmmaking. “They were like ‘This is amazing, we always knew you had an artistic eye’,” she reflected. “They always encouraged me, my mom [social researcher Carol Watson-Williams] brought me to all my rehearsals to get my costumes. I remember her putting together a make-up kit for me, so, when I went to rehearsals, I could do my own thing. I think it was just about them being, like, ‘how can we support you doing this?’ .”
And, what was the college experience like acquiring filmmaking know-how to jumpstart her journey? “SCAD is very hands-on. I did not have any written exams, we had to make films to get grades,” Williams informed. “I would say it was enriching and taught me a lot about being a working artist. That was their big thing, ‘we are teaching you practical skills, it’s not just theory’, but the education was very American, very centred around American directors.” Asked if this engendered any frustration being of Caribbean descent, she responded in the affirmative. “I was being taught by old white guys about other old white guys. In my last year, I had a woman professor and she was Afghani, and I was like ‘Thank God, she actually saved me. I was like ‘Girl, thank God you came here’.”
As for Oxford, treasured memories colour reflections of her two-year programme. “It expanded my view of what writing can be, what a poem can be, what any piece of writing can be. I think it was integral in that way, and also built my confidence as a writer.” To this end, the hyper-ambitious Williams who, at 19, self-published a collection of poetry, is expanding her literary output even further. She is currently writing her debut novel Black Rainfall, influenced by lyrics from a song by dancehall artiste Dexta Daps. She is angling to complete the manuscript by year-end, with a view to shop it around to book publishers. “I’m about 17,000 words in and write a minimum of 500 words every day,” she revealed. “I began writing it as a short story in the summer of 2022 for a school assignment, and then revisited the idea toward the end of 2023. The book is set in 1970s Jamaica when we had a lot of political tension, and is told from the perspective of two teenagers. I was listening to it so much when I started writing, those lyrics stuck with me,” shared Williams, who cites Nigerian author Chimamanda Adiche’s fictional immigrant tale Americanah as her best read to date. “I wish I had written it. To me it’s the greatest book ever … I love her,” she raved.
Film, though, remains Williams’ first love. She is intent on Brand Jamaica being part of the cinematic narrative she wants to craft going forward. “We truly have so much material here, and the stories told here deserve a bigger stage. I think we should capture those stories so it’s not just oral history.” Fingers crossed that someday she wins the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Palme d’Or award – “it celebrates auteurship,” she noted. Williams wants her reputation “to be that I am very easy to work with. That’s very important, if I am going on set, that is the goal, people to say ‘Rebecca was very easy to work with’. You want people to work well with you, and you want word to go around, and for it to be true.”
Next up is putting the finishing touches on her latest film work. “I really want to tell more black queer Jamaican stories. I think it’s an underrepresented community. I shot a short film earlier this year that is a love story between a trans man and a cis woman. I am excited for that to come out. That’s in post-production right now and we are working on music. I am hoping it will come out in August or September. I worked with Summer Eldemire on it, she wrote it and asked me to direct. We would want to put it into film festivals,” the multitasking creative revealed, moments before excusing herself for yet another video-editing session.