MAJESTY GARDEN FILM CLUB
Majesty Garden film club is a year round film production course and mobile cinema for 6 to 12 year old children in the neighboourhood of Majesty Garden on the outskirts of Kingston, facilitated for Studio 174 by Openvizor and Rainbow Collective.
Started in the summer of 2015 at the St Andrew's Settlement community centre in Majesty Garden, the club provides a safe space for children in the neighbourhood while nurturing creativity, teamwork and a love of arts and education. Senior students from the JAMARTIS programme run the club every Saturday, contributing to their own learning by mentoring younger children and passing on their recently aquired skills and experiences.
The Film Club's second film looked at the importance of the local basketball team building bridges in the community and was followed by a fusion of animation and documentary inverstigating local rumours of aligator sightings in Majesty Garden.
The Film Club never turns a child away and the team of facilitators bring a portable projecter and sound system to the community centre every weekend, creating a portable cinema where all children from the community are welcome to come and see films from around the world as well as those produced by the Film Club itself.
The film club is student led, with the first three films completed being conceived of, as well as produced by, the children themselves. Majesty Garden has been subjected to much negative press for many years, an issue which the children find highly disturbing and for their first project the film club took on the responsibility of portraying a positive vision of their home through a series of exercises and films examining perceptions of beauty in the neighbourhood. In the words of 6 year old Film Club member Jessica. "Our neighbourhood is called Majesty Garden because majesty means beautiful and garden means full of beautiful flowers"
Majesty Garden Film Club's current and ongoing project is the production of an educational series for children, teaching numeracy and literacy, in Patrois, through characters, stories, animation and music, using local loacations and found objects, to be distributed for the benefit of children in after school clubs around Jamaica.
