Directors Statement Excerpt #3

So here is the third and final installment of my 'official' directors statement for the film. I have been struggling with whether or not to make a few changes to the film for th last few weeks. Although it is finished I have been feeling like I could 'up' the pace for the opening and I think it finally clicked for me during the second screening at TVIFF over last weekend. So it's off to the races with that this week and we will roll out the slightly revised version for it's screening at Rivertown Film Society on October 22nd. I certainly hope that any of you out there who are based within the Westchester area will join us.

I am blessed in my life to have been raised across two continents and to have been taught to celebrate differences of language, society and color and I believe it helped me to keep making this film even when it seemed that it would never end in anything but endless boxes of wasted tape.

I am enormously indebted to all the people who helped me make this film and to those who have shared their thoughts on camera. The faces in this film and those who inhabit the many hours are a select group who will remain with me forever, whatever may come my way.

I must also thanks those family and friends who have humored me including my wife and kids who don’t quite get it “Daddy are you still making a film about apples?!”

There are two people whose lives passed during the making of this film. Lola Richardson who originally introduced me to Russell Holze and later became his wife left us early in 2008. I hope she will be watching over Russ’s shoulder. My father died two odd years ago from Alzheimer’s. ‘Zackie’ and I shared a difficult relationship and he knew little or nothing of this film as his disease crippled him, but I always knew Jamaica was his secret sanctuary and the home of his boyhood memories. It was this mysterious and magical Jamaica that I grew up with and may well have been the reason I took this on. His voice can be heard singing in the credits on a recording of Cordelia Brown recorded in 1948.

There remains a single person without whom it could not have been completed and that is my producing and writing partner Kevin Burke. Thanks Brother!