Film About Jamaican Farmworker Generates Discussion

By Neil Armstrong

Photo contributed   A still from the documentary 'Babe, I Hate to Go' by filmmaker, Andrew Moir.

A Canadian short film about a Jamaican farmworker was the subject of a recent panel discussion held at a university in Ontario to celebrate Black History Month.

Andrew Moir, 27, a producer and documentary filmmaker, was part of a panel at Brock University in St. Catharines where his 2017 film, ‘Babe, I Hate to Go,’ was screened on March 1.

The film tells the story of Delroy Dunkley, 52, a farmworker for 30 years, who usually spends six months every year working on farms in southwestern Ontario to support his family in Jamaica.

As the only breadwinner for his wife, Sophia, and six children, Dunkley, who works on a tobacco farm, discovers that he has cancer but keeps it a secret from his family. He subsequently died in 2015.

Moir knew Dunkley for about ten years before he started making the film because the Jamaican worked on his uncle’s farm in Mount Brydges over that time.

“Delroy was my uncle’s right-hand man,” he says.

Moir says when he graduated from film school six years ago he wanted to make a documentary portrait of the farm where his uncle worked because tobacco farming in southwestern Ontario is a dying way of life.

Over the first year of shooting he got to know Dunkley much better and it was shortly after, in 2014, that Dunkley was diagnosed with cancer.

“That’s where it began, this slow shift to make a documentary about him and his family and base the story more in Jamaica,” says Moir noting that he had been working on the film for the past five years.

He says the short film that was released last year is a small chapter in a much larger story.

Moir travelled to Jamaica five times over three years to shoot the film in Top Hill, St. Elizabeth.

He became very close with Dunkley’s family and was there when he passed away.

Moir said after he stopped shooting the film and had time to process what was going on he asked himself larger questions about the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP).

He said the program is integral to Canada’s agricultural economy and a big part of the Jamaican economy. He thinks there is always room for improvement with the program.

The film was finished in the spring of 2017 and premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian international documentary festival. It went on to different film festivals in the world.

‘Babe, I Hate to Go’ premiered on CBC in July and garnered a lot of attention on the internet. In November, it was released on Facebook and Moir said that’s when a lot of Jamaicans started watching. 

Photo contributed        Filmmaker, Andrew Moir, participated in a discussion at Brock University where his documentary, 'Babe, I Hate to Go,' was screened.

Another panelist, André Lyn, a social justice advocate, has visited several farms across southern Ontario to engage with the farmworkers who work in Canada yearly under the SAWP.

He says what the documentary showed that is hardly spoken about is that these men actually have families and they are connected to them.

“They don’t just come to Canada, earn money, send it back, go back to see them for about four months. It showed an intimacy that we don’t regularly see. It showed humanness that is a big piece of their life.”

Lyn says in the SAWP they are just seen as these precarious, disposable workers who come and work, get some money and go back home and kind of fade until the next season they come back.

“It raised the point, which we know, about them not showing the vulnerability of being sick. It took him [Delroy] a while to really acknowledge that he wasn’t well. There’s a particular fear around that because the minute you are not well and your employers know, the likelihood that you could be repatriated is so high.”

Lyn said Dunkley willed himself to be healthy enough to continue working because he knew he had a family.

“The piece that is uncommon too is the compassion and care that the employer had of him because he could have been sent home almost immediately when he wasn’t well and probably not working as hard as expected.”

Lyn noted that there is no pathway to citizenship for the workers and that it was written in the bilateral agreement back in 1966 that “they did not want these black men to be staying in Canada because they didn’t want them to be cohabitating with the white women.”

Many of them have been coming to Canada for more than twenty years, eight months every year.

Lyn said they pay into Employment Insurance, Canadian Pension Plan, and income tax but have very limited access; they no longer get parental benefits.

He said one of the things that as advocates, researchers and anybody who supports the workers know is what the workers have told them explicitly –“As much as we want things to change and to have improvements, please do not jeopardize our current income.”

A Jamaica Information Service report of a send-off ceremony for farmworkers in Kingston in January quotes Shahine Robinson, Minister of Labour and Social Security, saying the government is committed to the creation of jobs for all Jamaicans, noting that for 52 years, the SAWP has steadily provided employment opportunities for Jamaican workers.

She noted that for the 2017 calendar year, a total of 9,367 workers travelled to Canada, both under the SAWP and the Low Skill Programme.

[This story has been published in the North American Weekly Gleaner, March 22-28, 2018.]