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London-based arts and heritage organisation, Sweet Patootee Arts announces its powerful brand-new film installation CORNWALLIS CLOTH, launching at the Old Royal Naval College on Saturday 11th October, running until late 2026.
Commissioned by the Imperial War Museum as part of the 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund, CORNWALLIS CLOTH is inspired by oral histories and untold stories of Black Caribbean lives during the Second World War. The film delves into themes of loyalty, freedom, and the birth of post colonial identity, with dramatic intensity and satirical humour.
View the Trailer for CORNWALLIS CLOTH here
Synopsis of CORNWALLIS CLOTH
Set in a moonlit tropical garden in Barbados in 1942, the film centres around Miss Bonita Skeete (aka Bonny), a Black woman whose story becomes a powerful metaphor for Caribbean civil rights during the Second World War.
Through her spirited exchange with stirred up patriots, rebels, Black marketers and in-betweens, CORNWALLIS CLOTH revisits the 1942 U-Boat attack on SS Cornwallis, as well as war leaders, the fight for freedom, rationing, and the fate that befalls those found with looted ‘Cornwallis cloth’,
The film interweaves 3D sound design, performance, archive montage, and a soundtrack of calypso and colonial anthems, to create a captivating and poetic Caribbean comedy melodrama vignette.
