BY STEVEN JACKSON
Friday, February 14, 2014
FORMER JAMPRO film commissioner Kim Marie Spence has secured a prestigious doctoral research position in Australia which involves some undisclosed research on Jamaica.
She resigned from JAMPRO — the Government’s marketing agency — after tripling expenditure to the creative sector to just over $1 billion. She also reflected on shifting the once Hollywood-centric film commission to one centred on developing local films.
“It is a whole new world. I am in Australia on an Australian Award, doing post-graduate/doctoral research. Of course, it will involve research on Jamaica. I was interested in this opportunity as it gave me time to step back from the daily ‘fire-fighting’ and implementation that my former position required and look at wider best practices, principles and issues involved in designating the creative industries as a key part of Jamaica’s growth strategy,” she said in a mailed response to Caribbean Business Report queries. Follow-up queries on the precise nature of this research were unavailable up to press time.
Spence, whose scholarship and fellowships are funded by the Australian Government, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and also Wesleyan University. A little over a decade ago, she reportedly left a high-paying job on Wall Street to follow her convictions. Shortly after she became executive director at the think tank Capri (Caribbean Policy Research Institute) before venturing to JAMPRO as film commissioner.
Spence’s remit at JAMPRO encompassed the creative industries which includes film, photography, music, and dance. Total expenditure from that sector facilitated by JAMPRO more than tripled year-over-year to $1.16 billion up from $313 million, according to data from the Economic and Social Survey 2013 published by the Planning Institute of Jamaica. Government has hailed the 2012 results, while critics have describe 2011 as a down year.
Spence, however, oversaw the waves of expenditure since assuming the position in 2010. “As for numbers; I doubled the numbers in the first year and it was upward bound from there… However, there is lots more that it is hard to count,” she said.
Spence resigned and left JAMPRO about a month ago and quickly entered her programme in Australia. JAMPRO has yet to announce a new film commissioner.
“The highlight of my tenure at JAMPRO was the change in direction,” she said. “When I came in, there was a focus on Hollywood. However, given Jamaica’s fiscal situation, we could not realise the work from there, which was quite incentives-driven. We started looking at the audio-visual industry as a whole. This refocus was one that had been done in the industry itself — with the rise in the importance of television series, reality series and animation.
“Out of this refocus came the present animation initiative within which we facilitated ToonBoom. Also came the focus on reality television — ANTM — among many others,” she said.
Animation was the latest thrust by the commission seen as the new outsourcing frontier by Government. However, that was only half the story, “as there was little focus on the work Jamaicans were doing”. Under her watch, a barrage of local films entered cinemas and established directors and actors as stars.
“This is the sustainable aspect of the strategy — Jamaica as a (film and television) content generator. This is key from an economic and also a cultural perspective. I reached out to the distribution side of the business to facilitate greater knowledge of the kind of work Jamaica was producing,” she said, pointing films Better Mus Come, Ghetta Life, Songs of Redemption, One People, and television shows Mi an Mi Kru, Island Rockers, Beenie Man, etc.
“We were preparing Jamaica as a place to come and invest in content,” she reasoned.
The commission also looked beyond the USA and strengthened ties with the diaspora in a bid to ink distribution deals. “There is scope for some amount of Caribbean distribution and the African market, which continues to unfold; and the European market, particularly Germany with Hill an’ Gully Ride.
But financing and more rigorous data remain a perennial challenge for the industry, she reasoned.
“Jamaica is at a crossroads where we need to invest in growth areas — the new and the old. In addition, the world is changing and the new growth areas now are not very familiar — creative industries/entertainment, technology, logistics. The creative industries is an area that many do not understand… and do not take seriously, she said.
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Spence triples creative sector spend for Ja then heads to Australia
