Old friends Stone (Abdi Waithe) and Charlie (Muhammad Muwakil) are on different paths in GOD LOVES THE FIGHTER
GOD LOVES THE FIGHTER (Damian Marcano, 2013)
Available on DVD and VOD July 7
www.godlovesthefighter.com
If you missed Damian Marcano’s gripping God Loves the Fighter when it played the Urbanworld Film Festival last September and BAMcinématek’s Caribbean Film Series in April, you can now catch this realistic, unflinching portrait of street life in the capital of Trinidad & Tobago on DVD and VOD. Following in the tradition of such classic tales as Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come, Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, God Loves the Fighter is set in Port of Spain, which angry narrator King Curtis (Freetown Collective’s Lou Lyons) calls “blood city” and “gun town” and where Charlie Ward (Freetown Collective’s Muhammad Muwakil) is trying to make a better life for himself despite being dealt a bad hand. Desperate for money, Charlie hooks up with childhood friend Daniel (Abdi Waithe), now known as Stone, a powerful local gangster doing the dirty work for drug-dealing pimp Putao Singh (Darren Cheewah), a vicious, heavily tattooed man who walks around in nothing but flip-flops and ridiculously tight black Jockey shorts. Charlie seeks advice from his mentor and father figure, Mr. Odrick (Albert Laveau), a wise old man who has lost four sons to the violence on the streets. Meanwhile, smart young kid Chicken (Zion Henry) represents the future of the city, but he is brutalized by his mother (Penelope Spencer), who demands that he does whatever is necessary to bring home food for her, forgoing an education and instead meeting up with the wrong people. The multiple story lines all come together when Dinah (Jamie Lee Phillips), one of Putao’s prostitutes, decides that she’s not going to let what happened to her happen to his newest recruit, the young Nina (Tyker Phillips).
Characters dream of finding a way out in GOD LOVES THE FIGHTER
God Loves the Fighter is alive with the rhythms of Port of Spain, the sounds and colors, beautifully shot and edited by Marcano, who incorporates slow motion, jump cuts, and sometimes dizzying handheld camerawork to capture the dark mood on the streets, the lack of hope that is pervasive in this society. Marcano also cowrote the screenplay with executive producer Alexa Bailey, but most of the dialogue is improvised based on the script; the subtitles don’t always match what the characters are actually saying, which is far more poetic and natural. The evocative soundtrack, which is a character unto itself, consists of music by Freetown Collective and Q Major that furthers the emotional power and overarching moods. The title of the film, which has been a hit at festivals around the world but has not had a U.S. theatrical release, comes from a quote by Muwakil: “I believe that as much as God loves the prayerful penitent so too must he love the persistent, up against all odds death coming endlessly in waves but never go under, God loves the fighter.” Those words embody the provocative spirit of Marcano’s feature debut, a compelling work about his hometown, a place that leads King Curtis to ask, “So what’s in a name when a name is worthless? I sleep on the streets, but I’m still a king.”