Mary Wells is making waves in the Caribbean with her style of filmmaking and her award winning KINGSTON PARADISE now available through California Pictures, Inc.
This poignant film lays bare the rough and tumble life in Jamaica's Kingston. Hard hitting with beautiful cinematography directly shot on the streets of Kingston where poverty, beauty and desperation collide. KINGSTON PARADISE is a Jamaican story that transcends its island locale to become a universal story of people whose poverty seems to trap them in a life where reckless acts appear to be the only road to a better life.
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Visit the official Kingston Paradise Film website.
Kingston Paradise had its cinema opening on June 15, in Jamaica. Attendance was robust but low key, with Mary Wells and the two lead actors, a main funder (The Chase Fund) and some of the inner-city community members who worked on the set. Jamaican Press was also in attendance.
Mary Wells is an award winning independent film Director/ Writer and Producer based in Jamaica and the USA. She has worked for Government Broadcasting, US Cable TV, a private production company and has some twenty five years experience in television and film production. Her work has consisted mainly of small documentaries and dramas for young adults and children for mostly the Caribbean region. In 1999, her short documentary, “Now Jimmy!” was awarded “Outstanding Documentary from the Caribbean” in the Sheryl Lee Ralph Film & Music Festival. It was also accepted: in the prestigious, Toronto Int'l Film Festival, 2002. She studied Television Production and the Theatre Arts in Washington DC and continues to do Film/TV production work of all kinds. Her first debut feature narrative, “Kingston Paradise” won ‘Best Diaspora Feature’ in the African Movie Academy Awards 2014, dubbed by CNN as Africa’s Oscars. She is the first woman from Jamaica to do a feature film and ‘A Disquieted Sea’ will be her second feature. She is also one of the founding directors of CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution Inc and part owner of CaribbeanTalesFlix a film production company.
In Development from California Pictures, Inc.
A woman grapples with going public in the fight to save a valuable highly protected natural reserve, while attempting to save her sanity from two romantic relationships: (her country and a boyfriend), with very different values. In a beautiful love story, life is increasingly unsettling for Moya due to a Chinese company that maybe given the go ahead to build and lease a huge billion dollar trans-shipment port in her village bay, which will destroy the countries richest marine life and wetlands. Also, a living for hundreds of fisher folk and will intensify climate change problems already on the Island, such as terrible droughts, forest fires and severe water shortages and land protection against unusual rain storms. Sick of the injustice and short sightedness, as a lawyer and a junior Member of Parliament, she decides to sue and turn against her own party. Publicly, she speaks out about the wrongs of the deal and with village support tries to stall the project as these gatekeepers will stop at nothing. Unfortunately, in a poor Island nation from the south, such a move is not only dangerous, its suicidal. Her boyfriend is furious, but not for the right reasons, as he and his buddies have a plan to make a killing from the Chinese.