Children of God

“Children of God,” a full-length feature film that opened the 6th annual Bahamas International Film Festival early in December, and boots that image of perfection clean out of the water. Kareem Mortimer’s movie takes on the gritty and all too real problem of homophobia, which is widespread, not only in former British colony The Bahamas, but also the entire Caribbean.

His first thoughts about doing a movie was to create an interesting romantic love story, of sorts, but things took a different turn after the islands were rocked by the murder of five gay men over a relatively short period of time and the back end of 2007 and the front of 2008

“Two of them I knew personally,” he said in a recent interview “One was the subject of a documentary I produced, he had AIDS and was killed very violently near where I live. He was almost decapitated. Another guy, a fashion designer, was stabbed multiple times in his house.”

It’s not easy being an open gay man in the Bahamas, as Kareem said “I felt really afraid. I can’t even express how I felt, and one politician said things like ‘the only good homosexual is a dead homosexual’ that went unchallenged in the country. Bahamians are very generous, loving people, but it was an act of great shame.”

Kareem chose to focused the story on three very different people, the pastors wife, the pastor by the way is secretly gay, a young black guy who is trying to hide his sexuality from his family, finally a white man who has a few conflicts in his life, with who the young guy gets involved with.

The cast is mainly Bahamians and the move was shot in just over 24 days, Children of God” had little trouble finding financial backers, despite it’s rather controversial subject matter “I raised the money locally from supporters of my work, I called in favours from individuals who have supported my work.”