Beach Inna Bondage: The Fight for Jamaica's Coastline

Beach Inna Bondage is a short documentary by Kingston-based Dutch  filmmaking duo Emiel Martens and Elsie Vermeer in collaboration with the  Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (JaBBEM) and  Grammy-winning Jamaican reggae arist Keznamdi exploring the growing  struggle for beach access in Jamaica. Since the 1950s, public access to  the island’s beaches has steadily declined, leaving less than one  percent of the coastline publicly accessible for Jamaicans. Over the  decades, most of Jamaica’s beaches have been captured by private and  tourist interests, and particularly since the 2000s large-scale hotel  developments have limited beach access for Jamaicans.

This film follows the grassroots movement resisting the privatization  of Jamaican beaches by zooming in on three frontline struggles: Bob  Marley Beach near Kingston, the Blue Lagoon in the parish of Portland,  and Mammee Bay Beach on the island’s North Coast. The interviewees, all  Jamaicans, reveal how the 1956 Beach Control Act, which is still in  effect today, vests ownership of the foreshore in the Jamaican state  (and actually the British Crown) and traces how this colonial-era law,  combined with the island’s all-inclusive tourism model, has displaced  communities, disrupted livelihoods, and degraded environments.  Interwoven with archival footage, news clips, and recordings of protest  rallies and court cases, the interviewees situate today’s beach access  struggles within Jamaica’s troubled history of land ownership following  emancipation and independence. They argue that the island’s tourism  industry replicates plantation logic by monopolizing land, concentrating  wealth, exporting profits, and, ultimately, marginalizing the people.

Beach Inna Bondage shows that beach access, which is not only an  issue in Jamaica but across the Caribbean and beyond, is an urgent  matter of historical, economic, social, cultural and environmental  justice, raising the question of who the tropical paradise of sun, sand,  and sea truly serves, and at what cost...