JAMAICAN actor Andre Morris is lead actor in the short film Silver Roll which premiered in Panama last Tuesday.
Directed by Panamanian Carolina Borrero, Silver Roll is one of the five short films making up the Historias del Canal festival which explores five different fictional storylines, located during five significant moments in the history of Panama. The event is under the theme “100 years and thousands of stories around the Panama Canal”.
“The experience was great. I was not only involved in a film being shot in Panama but I was involved in recreating a part of Jamaican history that has never been told. A lot of Jamaicans came to Panama to work on the canal and died in the process. Marcus Garvey played an important role in defending the rights of the workers building the canal. The movie helps to tell this story, of how we (Jamaicans) contributed to the building of this engineering masterpiece,” said Morris.
Silver Roll looks at the sacrifice of immigrants trying to find a better future for themselves and their families. It is a tragic love story about a young Jamaican couple Phillip and Clarisse, played by Morris and American actress Lakisha May (Broadwalk Empire) respectively, set against the backdrop of the first wedding held under West Indian traditions in Panama.
Morris, comes from a theatre background, having discovered live performance through an elective while attending University of Technology (UTech), and continued his training with the JAMBIZ Centerstage Workshop before being cast in a number of local plays including Robin Baston’s A Soh It Goh and What Is Fi Yuh, Amba Chavannes’ Season Rice and Dahlia Harris’s Judgement.
The only Jamaican actor to make the final cut, Morris hopes that this film is just the beginning of many more international and local roles and is looking forward to being back on the Jamaican theatre scene.
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