The Harder They Come
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
Featuring a big name in reggae (Jimmy Cliff, 1944–2025), it chronicles the rise of a singer from a poor background who is broken by the music industry before becoming a gangster idolized by the public.
Perry Henzell
Perry Henzell was a Jamaican director. He directed the first Jamaican feature film, The Harder They Come (1972), co-written by Trevor D. Rhone and starring singer-songwriter Jimmy Cliff. He studied at McGill University in the mid-1950s, before returning to Jamaica and eventually directing this film. Henzell also shot some footage for what was planned as his next film, No Place Like Home, but he went broke before he could finish the film. Fed up by this, he went on to become a writer, publishing his first novel, Power Game, in 1982. Both were meant to complete a planned trilogy of films centring on the Jamaican criminal known as Rhyging, Ivanhoe Martin. Thought lost for years, the footage for No Place Like Home later resurfaced and a rough cut of the film was finally screened at TIFF in 2006. The film featured music from Bob Marley, Toots and the Maytals, The Three Degrees, and Marcia Griffiths.
