Perry Henzell

Perry Henzell (7 March 1936 – 30 November 2006) was a Jamaican director. He directed the first Jamaican feature film, The Harder They Come, co-written by Trevor D. Rhone and starring Jimmy Cliff.

Life and career

Henzell, whose ancestors included Huguenot glassblowers and an old English family who had made their fortune growing sugar cane on Antigua, was born in Annotto Bay, Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica, and grew up on the Caymanas sugar-cane estate near Kingston. He was sent to Shrewsbury School in the United Kingdom at the age of 14 and later attended McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1953 and 1954. He then dropped out of this school, choosing instead to hitchhike around Europe. He eventually got work as a stagehand for BBC television in London.

In 1965, Henzell married Sally Densham. Both were meant to complete a planned trilogy of films centring on Ivanhoe Martin. The footage for No Place Like Home was lost. Years later, he came across editing tapes in a lab in New York. Just to have a sense of completion, he worked on the project. When he showed it to a few friends, their response was enthusiastic. He eventually was able to retrieve the original footage.

A rough cut of No Place Like Home, which features music from Bob Marley, Toots and the Maytals, The Three Degrees, and Marcia Griffiths, was screened for the public at the 31st annual Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006 The documentary Perry Henzell: A Filmmaker’s Odyssey, directed by David Garonzik and Arthur Gorson, traces the journey to bring No Place Like Home to the big screen.

Henzell had continued to work after being diagnosed in 2000 with cancer. He died from it on 30 November 2006.