Brief Encounters - Episode 12

Matthew Sweet transports listeners into cinemas located around the world with a series of short features, eavesdropping on their stories, their characters and occasionally trying the snacks. In this episode he is in the Carib cinema, in Kingston Jamaica. Located in Cross Roads in Kingston, with supermarkets, car dealerships, furniture stores and fast food joints, but above all these rises what was once the largest building on the island - a white cliff of 1930s concrete with a carved figure on the front: Venus rising from stylised banks of waves. The 1,750-seater cinema was once decorated to give the impression of being submerged under the sea - but that illusion has gone. Once the great reggae stars played in this building - and that is just one part of the relationship between cinema and Jamaican culture, as Matthew discovers Producers: Sara Jane Hall & Neil George.