A film about gender relations in Jamaica seen through dancehall dancing culture.

Jamaica has more churches per capita than any other place in the world. It also has more murders, except for the times when they get eclipsed by an occasional genocide in Africa. But in the most notorious parts of the gang war infested garrisons, where no cab driver will take a foreigner even at daytime, there's a party going on. Every single night of the week street dances are kept in different ghettos, where rivaling neighborhoods meet unarmed to have fun. The music is loud and aggressive and the dancing is wild, sexually explicit and the dancers often utilize props provided by the surroundings. Loudspeakers, trees, cars and buses are all used for dancing a dance that for the untrained eye looks like a combination of fighting and copulation.

But the dance is a very lively cultural phenomenon where new moves are developed weekly and spread out to the world through bootleg dvds. All dances have a name and a history and at least one person or crew who claims to be the architect behind it. Every year the worlds best female dancer is crowned at the spectacular and heavily sponsored International Dancehall Queen Contest. This film takes place in the weeks around the contest of 2007 - the biggest event ever in this subculture.

The film investigates the culture behind dancehall dancing and tries to find out how this dance became as absurd as it is today. It gives a glimpse at what kind of people the dancers are, how they live and why dancing is important to them.

The film is shot in 2007 in Kingston and Montego Bay, with footage from the two most notorious street parties Dutty Fridaze and Passa Passa and interviews with some of the biggest dancehall dancers in the world including Momo, Fleshy and Shelly Belly. International reggae superstar Beenie Man talks about the history of dancehall dancing and the interaction dancers and singers have in the dancehall world. One of the main entrepreneurs of the subculture, videoman Scrappy talks about the way filming and distributing dancehall footage has revolutionized the dancing and made it a possible escape from the life of poverty. Well-informed outsiders such as Jamaican-born poet Stacy-Ann Chin and professor at the University of the West Indies Carolyn Cooper help forth a certain understanding of this complex and widely misunderstood phenomenon. And city dwellers and scenesters such as producer Delroy Green, dancehall artist Crazy Chris and radio personality Champagne share their insight of the unquestionable patriarchy that is Jamaica. Where hugging up is against the law, holding hands and kissing is unseen outside the privacy of the home, parenting is done with a firm slap of the hand, girls and boys are treated like different species, homosexuality and oral sex is completely banned both socially and by law and where dancing seems like a ventilation device that blows off explosive sexual steam between women and men - or as it is always put in Jamaica - between Man and Ooman.

Duration 56:30 mins

Documentary, Denmark 2008

Directed by Andreas Johnsen & Rasmus Poulsen

Film Editor Adam Nielsen

Photography Andreas Johnsen

Produced by Rosforth