Filmmaker Ian Jackson hopes to film his contemporary spin on Romeo and Juliet in Washington Heights Courtesy Lourdes Carrasco Aspiring filmmaker Ian Jackson (inset) assembled a diverse cast for “Mari en Maraña.” He is scaling the Heights of literary expression. A 32-year-old aspiring filmmaker wants to put an upper Manhattan spin on the timeless coming-of-age fable of Romeo and Juliet. The film, titled “Mari en Maraña,” centers on an interracial relationship between a Dominican woman and a Haitian man in Washington Heights, and the director sees the story as a metaphor for the neighborhood in which it’s set. “We’re exploring this very controversial subject of race within the community, which happens to mirror the things that are happening in the neighborhood as the gentrifying white and hipster populations come in,” said Ian Jackson, 32, who is launching a fund-raising campaign in hopes of kicking off filming later this year. “This is definitely the moment to tell a story like this,” adds Jackson, explaining that it’s also a riff on the complicated relationship between Dominicans and Haitians, whose neighboring homelands comprise the tiny Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Hundreds of thousands of Dominican residents who are of Haitian descent could face deportation in the aftermath of a controversial ruling last year by the Dominican Constitutional Court. I can’t [...] newsnyork/filmmaker-ian-jackson-hopes-to-film-his-contemporary-spin-on-romeo-and-juliet-in-washington-heights/
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 22:45:23 +0000
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