By Peter Polack

Peter Polack

The emperor of the world recently announced that he was imposing a 100% tariff on all foreign made films broadcast in the United States.

This will be bad news for the Jamaican prime minister who has just announced he is joining the global war on gangs or kowtow, the new diplomatic strategy.

Jamaica has provided a superb location for over one hundred and fifty mostly American produced movies and this latest pronunciation will be the death knell for any export expectations of the Jamaica Film Commission to the USA. 

Retrospectively, are Americans to be denied the famous Jamaican opus, The Harder They Come?

Other Caribbean countries do not have the length and breadth of film production history  and earning like Jamaica but it is a hindrance nevertheless.

Film making is very similar to real estate and the audience draw is often to fabulous locations or location, location and location. In the rush to judgment on American appreciation of foreign culture, American filmmakers may be denied an integral part of their palette. Sweeping views of the Caribbean and other locales, or not. There could be an exemption.

This recent development is at the end of a long line of punishing tariffs on several major countries, many justified, such as to hinder the Russian invasion in Ukraine. India, for example, has been twisting in the wind between Russia and the American defence of Ukraine.

This latest development follows Indian insistence on trading with Russia and it will be a massive blow to Bollywood.

We will all have to suffer the consequences of this but in the end the survival of a beleaguered country will have to come before the cinematic experience.

All for one, and one for all.

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands for several decade. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88. 

His views are his own.