Oral presentation: Emiel Martens and Elsie Vermeer

Beach Inna Bondage: The Fight for Jamaica’s Coastline is a research-based documentary exploring the growing struggle for beach access in Jamaica. Since the 1950s, access to the island’s beaches has steadily declined, leaving less than one percent of the coastline publicly accessible. Over the decades, most of Jamaica’s beaches have been captured by private and tourist interests, and particularly since the 2000s large-scale hotel developments have limited beach access for Jamaicans.

This film follows the movement resisting the privatization of Jamaican beaches by zooming in on three frontline struggles: Bob Marley Beach near Kingston, the Blue Lagoon in Portland, and Mammee Bay Beach on the North Coast. The interviewees reveal how the 1956 Beach Control Act, which is still in effect today, vests ownership of the foreshore in the Jamaican state (and actually the British Crown) and traces how this colonial-era law, combined with the island’s all-inclusive tourism model, has displaced communities, disrupted livelihoods, and degraded environments.

Interwoven with archival footage, news clips, and live coverage, the interviewees situate today’s beach access struggles within Jamaica’s colonial history of land ownership. They argue that the island’s tourism industry replicates the plantation by monopolizing land, concentrating wealth, exporting profits, and, ultimately, marginalizing the people.

Beach Inna Bondage shows that beach access, which is not only an issue in Jamaica but across the Caribbean, is an urgent matter of economic, social, and environmental justice, raising the question of who the tropical paradise of sun, sand, and sea truly serves, and at what cost...