Documentarist, feature film and television director Maria Govan has been a significant figure in Bahamian independent filmmaking since her early forays into what she calls ‘guerilla documentary’. Working her way into the industry during four years of production experience in Los Angeles, Govan returned to the Bahamas to make a series of locally-based documentaries including JUNKANOO: THE HEARTBEAT OF A PEOPLE (2000), WHERE I’M FROM: HIV AND AIDS IN THE BAHAMAS (2004), and a historical documentary on Bahamian women’s suffrage, WOMANISH WAYS: FREEDOM, HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY (2012).

Govan’s concern with stories told from the social margins has continued to colour her films over two increasingly successful decades. In 2008, she moved into feature film with the multiply award-winning coming-of-age drama RAIN. The film traces the journey of the adolescent female protagonist Rain from her grandmother’s home on one of the more remote Bahamian islands, Ragged Island, to a new and troubled life with her drug-dependent mother in Gambier Village, Nassau.

RAIN set the tone for Govan’s filmmaking in its sensitive exploration of the human stories embedded in Bahamian landscapes. As we watch the budding distance runner Rain on her training runs around Gambier Village and the island shoreline, we come to understand her story as rooted in island milieux that the camera maps as sites of community and Bahamian belonging. A similar embedding in Caribbean senses of place emerges in Govan’s second feature, PLAY THE DEVIL (2018). Part-financed by the Trinidad Film Commission, the film was researched by Govan on journeys across Trinidad, including in Paramin, a mountain village located on one of the highest points of western Trinidad. PLAY THE DEVIL’s story of queer sexuality and male violence in the carnival setting of Trinidadian mas was born for Govan—as she explains in a 2016 interview—from her experience of a landscape that ‘really spoke to me….just being there…it sounds so silly, but the story crystallized’.

Speaking two years later at a Bahamas Stage and Screen Association writers’ workshop, Govan expanded on an approach to filmmaking that draws on her documentary experience to engage in situ with queer, female, and socio-economically marginal Caribbean experiences. As she researches emerging projects, Govan finds that her stories ‘crystallize’ first into ‘a really strong visual metaphor’: the titular ‘rain’ in her 2008 first feature, the blue devils of Paramin ritual in PLAY THE DEVIL, or in her short film FULL CIRCLE (2014), the ‘circle’ of interlocking dependencies that binds abused women into cycles of violence.

These and similar images are for Govan the soul of films with strong storylines that speak compellingly of Bahamian and Caribbean, but also planetary concerns. Amongst the many questions exercising Govan are gender violence, LGBTQ+ identity, poverty and deprivation, but also the life-sustaining values of friendship, sexual and cultural diversity, artistic experiment—and last but by no means least, Bahamian belonging.

Govan’s attachment to regional milieux may be evident across her filmmaking; but she is critical too of a Bahamian production context that lacks crucial infrastructure for independent film, and struggles to prioritise film ‘as art and social commentary….a constructive mirror to reflect back our society’ (Govan interviewed for The Stew, March 2017). That Govan herself provides just such a mirror both to Bahamian audiences, and to viewers on international arthouse, LGBTQ+, feminist and independent festival circuits, is evident from the awards and plaudits her films have won at events across North America, Europe and East Asia. The trailers on this page will hopefully also entice newcomers to Govan to engage with the powerful stories and the always compelling visual language of her films.

© Erica Carter. 11.10.2022

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