Outdeh – The Youth Of Jamaica (Louis Josek, 2019) : Germany

Reviewed by Scott Kipp at SBIFF 2020.

The promotion photo above shows how the film didn’t have any direction.  Who is this kid and why is he looking down?  He doesn’t seem to have any relation to the movie.

The documentary Out Deh was filled with beautiful scenery, but lacked a story. The movie followed three Jamaican youth around the island in their daily lives that usually didn’t go anywhere. The only character who went anywhere was a rapper who went on tour of Japan. Otherwise, the characters just surfed or played soccer to no conclusion.  The movie was more like reality TV that goes nowhere than a documentary.

The film starts from the slow-motion perspective of a passenger looking out the window of the car. The slow motion effect of driving through the busy city-scape of a Jamaican town was interesting, but it kept going on and on. The repeated use of the slow motion effect throughout the movie ended up adding a half an hour to the movie and not adding to the story.

The driver in the opening scene ends up pulling over and giving a ride to a hitchhiker with a skateboard.  The scene was obviously rigged. The driver and passenger act like they don’t know each other, but how would that happen with the cameraman in the car. The conversation in the car is banal and the driver acts like he doesn’t know what surfing is. The conversation goes nowhere like most of the movie.

The three characters in the movie were a surfer, rapper and footballer (soccer player). While the rapper and surfer were easy to recognize, I had trouble identifying the footballer because he was usually walking away from the camera and to nowhere. I can’t remember him saying anything or doing anything worth the bits of the recording. He did eventually play soccer in a pickup game in his neighborhood, but I thought he would go to a tournament or something. It would have been much better to film someone on the national Jamaican soccer team instead of this poor lost kid.

The surfer had a similar problem of not going anywhere with his life. While the surfing videos were beautiful and the waves got bigger, he didn’t go to a tournament or do anything worth noting.

The one exceptional character who went somewhere was the rapper. The rapper did suddenly go on a tour of Japan, but they mainly showed random clips of the tour instead of telling a story.

The lack of story is what I had problem with in this documentary. While the people might have been going somewhere, this documentary didn’t capture it in a story.