How Long Is “Fire in Babylon”?

The Caribbean islands of Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad are rarely treated as a united entity in either sports of politics, but they are in the game of Cricket, where players from these countries join forces to play on the West Indies team in Cricket's world cup tournament. For years, the West Indian team had a reputation for entertaining but not especially skillful play, but that changed in 1975, when team captain Clive Lloyd recruited a handful of world-class players, including Colin Croft, Joel Garner, Michael Holding and Andy Roberts, and introduced a physically aggressive style of play that emphasized high-speed bowling. Suddenly the West Indian team was a force to be reckoned with, and at a time when racial strife in the UK and apartheid in South Africa were becoming issues of global importance, a team of black athletes came to dominate Cricket, making the team's championship status a major story in the news section as well as the sports pages. Filmmaker Stevan Riley tells the story of how the West Indies became the dominant force in Cricket in the 1970s in the documentary Fire In Babylon; featuring a score dominated by classic reggae, the film was an official selection at the 2010 BFI London Film Festival.