‘Stew Peas’ premiere cooking for June 27

What began as a joke about food would lead to the development of a feature film for film-maker Sosiessia Nixon-Kelly. Moving a project from concept to a full-length film is no small feat. But when that work is fuelled by passion, that labour of love can evolve into a production that captivates audiences, sparks conversations in both public and private spaces, and ultimately, earns accolades that place Jamaica on the cinematic map.

Come Saturday, June 27, the Carib 5 cinema will host the premiere of the much-anticipated film Stew Peas. Written, directed, and produced by Nixon-Kelly, an award-winning Jamaican cinematographer, it highlights the trials and triumphs of the Caribbean experience in a medium that is both realistic and riveting. The Sunday Gleaner caught up with Nixon-Kelly to talk about her cinematic adventures and how she cooked up Stew Peas in the first place.

“It was during Hurricane Beryl that I was cooking stewed peas in the kitchen, and my husband walked in and smelled the aroma and said, ‘A dis you use and tie me’, and we started joking about it, and I said I’m going to write a film called Stew Peas,” shared Nixon-Kelly. 

“I had no plot and no concept. About two weeks later, I was sitting down with a friend of mine from Africa, and she spoke about some African traditions that were passed down to us in Jamaica. She shared that the whole idea of binding a man with blood is a West African cultural thing, and I told her Jamaicans believe that a woman can use stew peas to ‘tie’ a man. She said it comes from the belief that natural elements like blood hold certain powers. She said, think about how Christians are always singing about ‘there is power in the blood’ and how Jamaicans like to plead the blood of Jesus and the power of the blood of the lamb. All of that is coming from West African traditions that were passed down during slavery, and the intermingling of African spiritualism and Christianity is where it is coming from and why some rituals were outlawed in Jamaica.”

With that, Nixon-Kelly started to conceptualise Stew Peas. “I wanted to tell a story that was entertaining because I’m not going to write a story just because I want to have something out. I have to intertwine the theme into a narrative that is entertaining because it’s the movies, so you want to suspend reality. So I started with the character development, and the story started coming together. In two weeks, I had a script written,” she shared. 

The film, she shared, has many layers. “On the surface, the film is about a detective who is obsessed with finding the killer of her best friend, but then a lot of things started to deteriorate in her home and family life. Overwhelmed and trying to balance things out, she hires a housekeeper who realised the chinks in the family structure and became obsessed with the detective’s husband and decided to try to bind the man to her. She cooks a nice pot of stew peas with the infamous secret ingredient which triggers a chain of events where secrets are eventually uncovered,” said Nixon-Kelly. 

Though Stew Peas is Nixon-Kelly’s first feature film, she has done over ten short films, many of which have won various international awards, including the 2023 hit Raw Material. “With Raw Material, we went to numerous film festivals and won over 23 international awards for the film, and because one of the festivals we won at was an Oscar-qualifying one, the film itself became Oscar-qualifying, which meant it then qualified for an Oscar nomination. It also won Best Diaspora Short Film at the Africa Movie Academy Awards, which is similar to the Oscars but for the continent of Africa, beating out other films from the UK, the Caribbean, and other regions.”  

But what led a regular Jamaican girl from White Horses in St Thomas to become a celebrated movie maker? “Growing up, I’ve always loved writing because I had a really rough childhood, so my escape was to sit under my mango tree and write songs, poems, short stories, etc,” shared Nixon-Kelly. “At university, I did freshman composition, and my first essay blew my professor away, who told me I had real talent and [he] was going to take me to the printery and give me an IMDb [ID] number so I could start publishing my stories. I just said ‘OK, yeah’ because I didn’t see it as any big talent. When I was in my third year, my professor wrote his own textbook, and skipping through it, I realised that the stories I had submitted in class were in the textbook as samples of how to write, and I was like ‘Wow’”.

She was also a lover of movies, but didn’t understand how to work her stories into a script or what a screenplay was. “My husband was actively working in the film industry, but I didn’t have any interest in production until one day he said he bought a new camera and wanted to test it out. He had shot infomercials, commercials, music videos, and so he said, ‘I want to start shooting films’, so I began researching how to write screenplays, the formatting, etc,” shared Nixon-Kelly of her start. “Later, to test his camera, I began finding him locations and went on the film set for the first time and realised that I actually liked doing this.”

This led Nixon-Kelly to write Raw Material, and the rest, they say, is history. 

Stew Peas stars radio host and social media content creator Kerry-Ann Collins, better known as Chiney-K; Mr World 2024 Tarique Barrett; Shak-Quera South; Moses Wallace; Shernet Swearine; Kimberlee Dobson; and Andre Campbell. 

nicola.cunningham@gleanerjm.com