Children of God (2010)
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Children of God Movie Review
Children of God is a 2010 Bahamian drama film directed by Kareem Mortimer and starring Stephen Tyrone Williams and Johnny Roberts. It’s an overly preachy, though often wonderful film.
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“What are we doing?“
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The story of two young Bahamian men who fall in love with each other and portrays the homophobia of the Bahamian society. The Bahamas is a small North American country comprising 400 thousand people. It has a very small film industry with this movie being among the most important and best known ones.
Writer-director Kareem Mortimer clearly wanted to explore his own anxieties about sexuality through this project, but the problem here is that he included way too many speeches about homosexuality from both the accepting and the opposing side, making the film very much didactic. It wasn’t necessary to go about it this way and the film desperately needed more nuance in its approach.
With that being said, Children of God was still quite an engaging watch due to its well painted characters and some genuinely heartwarming moments. Lena is a conservative Christian woman whose marriage is falling apart. Her husband is gay and he transmitted an STD to her. All of this anger leads to her starting a campaign against gay people. We’ve seen stories like this before, but this scenario can often happen in real life, so it was important to depict it in this country as well.
But the emotional core of the movie and by far the best reason to see it is the romance between Romeo and Johnny. The former is a buff black man while the latter is a skinny white guy from Nassau. The two share nothing in common, but their differences made this pairing unique and realistic.
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Children of God is at its best when focusing on the dynamic between the two. All of the scenes on the beach are gorgeously shot and just very endearing while the dance sequence between the two men was genuinely romantic and unforgettable. The acting is pretty good across the board and so was the characterization, but it’s a shame that the film did not just focus on this couple, instead spinning too often to didacticism. Its ending was also too dark.
Children of God is a deeply flawed, but still very engaging and often times quite moving drama about homophobia in The Bahamas. The movie is very well acted, gorgeously shot and at times genuinely heartwarming with the romantic scenes being the highlights. The problem here was its overly didactic approach at tackling this issue with the third act in particular being plagued by way too many speeches.
My Rating – 3.5
This is the 13th film in my American Cinema Marathon where I will watch one film from each American country every day. Next up is 🇦🇷.
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