THE FILM
“ If you don’t know what you’re looking for, no one can help you find it. ”
Illustrated by Adam G
Bankie Banx: King of the Dune paints a colorful portrait of the iconoclastic Anguillian musician and provocateur whose unlikely career spans more than five decades and continues to this day. “You can identify his life in his music,” says Bankie’s brother Val, and Bankie’s extensive catalog indeed charts his restless journey with poetic self-awareness.
Clement “Bankie” Banks was born in 1953 and raised by his single mother after the death of his father on what was then an underdeveloped and resource-poor island. Drawn to music at an early age, Bankie built his first guitar at the age of ten, joined a band at thirteen, and as a young man did the unthinkable, abandoning a prized government job to pursue his dream of becoming a professional musician. His first album, Bankie Banx and The Roots & Herbs, was an immediate success, making Bankie a household name throughout the Caribbean alongside Jamaican icons Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Bankie’s unique sound and socially conscious lyrics earned him an invitation to Reggae Sunsplash in 1983, and a year later he and his band departed for England.
After touring internationally for several years, Bankie and “Sheriff Bob” Saidenberg launched the Moonsplash Music Festival in 1990, and a few years later (after getting “Busted in Barbados”) he officially opened the Dune Preserve, a fantastical beach bar crafted from driftwood and repurposed materials, as a permanent home for Moonsplash and year-round music venue.
Bankie’s narrative is inextricably linked to Anguilla’s unusual history and current crises. The arid island’s soil wasn’t fertile enough to produce cash crops, and the failure of the plantation economy paved the way for Black land ownership and a fiercely independent Anguillian spirit. Bankie’s father purchased the land where the Dune Preserve currently sits in the 1950’s before beachfront property was considered desirable, and Bankie’s mother understood that this humble plot represented generational wealth, refusing to sell it even while juggling multiple jobs to keep her family afloat. Unfortunately, the Dune now exists at the mercy of extreme weather events, and Bankie’s “treehouse on the beach” has become a symbol of the perils of climate crisis. “If you want to know how many forms the Dune has been in, you just have to track the number of hurricanes,” says Bankie’s son Olaide, and the tenacity Bankie has demonstrated by rebuilding over and over again made him uniquely able to face the challenges posed by the pandemic. To quote a song Bankie wrote in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, “It ain’t easy, but it’s alright.”
After years of enduring the indignities of life on the road, Bankie is now in the rare position of having audiences and world class musicians come to him. Performing his own music while speaking truth to power from the unofficial autonomous zone of the “Planet Dune,” Bankie Banx enjoys what many artists strive for but few achieve: life lived entirely on his own terms.
— Bankie Banx
BANKIE BANX
Bankie Banx is a pioneering Anguillian musician and local legend who became the first non-Jamaican invited to perform at Reggae Sunsplash and the first Anguillian to have a successful international career as a full-time musician. Dubbed the “Bob Dylan of the Caribbean,” Bankie’s unique blend of socially conscious reggae, folk, jazz, and rock conjures names ranging from Bob Marley to Tom Waits. Bankie is also known for designing and presiding over his “treehouse on the beach, the Dune Preserve, which was voted #1 Best Beach Bar in the World by CNN in 2013 and for co-founding Moonsplash, the longest running independent music festival in the Caribbean. His latest album is due out for release later this year.
photo credit: Marta Federici
GORDON WOODWARD | EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Gordon is a film and music enthusiast, though he has spent the bulk of his career in private equity at Kohlberg & Company, one of the oldest and best-regarded firms in finance. Since 2010, he has served as Kohlberg’s Chief Investment Officer, overseeing $25 billion of assets under management and all of the Firm’s day-to-day investment activities, including its industry-leading Environmental Social & Governance (ESG) efforts. King of the Dune is Gordon’s first film Executive Producer credit. In 1995, he was awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award by the Kennedy Center for his role co-writing, appearing in and producing the short-film, The Man with the Golden Rolodex. Gordon is also the Producer of the folk-reggae artist Mishka’s latest album, This Love, and the forthcoming new album by Omari Banks, the international reggae star, former professional cricket legend and son of Bankie Banx. Gordon received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1992.
Gordon and his wife Ann live part-time on the island of Anguilla, the home of the film’s subject. They have been coming to Anguilla since 2004, and have been fans of Bankie Banx and his music since the day they arrived. In 2010, Bankie kicked off his Midnight in America U.S. tour with a private concert at the Woodward’s home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Bankie, Ann and Gordon have been close ever since. Then, in December 2019, Ann and Gordon attended a benefit for Bankie’s Project Stingray charity, which provides instruments and instruction to at-risk local children. Over a whiskey or two following the event, Bankie mentioned he had a completed a first draft of his autobiography. Hearing this, Gordon told Bankie that his life would make a great documentary film. Hundreds of interviews, thousands of hours of film and a pandemic later, King of the Dune arrives.
photo credit: Jen Cardillo
NARA GARBER | DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, EDITOR
Nara Garber is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker specializing in observational social issue documentaries and accustomed to wearing multiple hats on the same project. Cinematography credits include Peabody Award winner Best Kept Secret (POV), Making the Crooked Straight (HBO), Keep Talking (PBS), and Flat Daddy (PBS America), which she also co-directed and co-produced. Nara has contributed camera work to Academy Award winner Alex Gibney’s Finding Fela and Emmy-nominated End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock (Fuse TV), and she directs and produces short films for arts organizations and non-profits in New York City between long-form projects. After more than two decades of working in film, she still has an abiding belief in the power of moving images to increase understanding and enrich the human experience.
photo credit: Ian Dudley
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
When Gordon Woodward, the film’s executive producer, first proposed collaborating on a documentary about Bankie Banx, I was not wholly enthusiastic; there were so many urgent stateside issues in 2019 that I couldn’t quite see myself committing precious time to filming a musician in Anguilla. Gordon’s passion for Bankie’s artistry was persuasive, however, and we agreed to a four-day test shoot in February of 2020.
Over the course of those four days, Bankie proved to be a challenging but intriguing subject. He is so accustomed to steering his own narrative that we scuffled daily for directorial control, and his steady stream of unsolicited suggestions illustrated a truth mentioned in almost every interview: Bankie’s brain does not turn off. The child who could not sit still became the ten-year-old who built his own guitar who became the first Anguillian to make a living playing music who became a local legend and artist/entrepreneur who answers to no one while opening doors for friends and family and a generation of younger musicians. None of this would have been possible had he stuck to the script. Bankie’s restless energy and creative drive forged paths where there were none and continue to find an outlet in his music, his ever-evolving beach bar, his music festival, and his regular tirades against corruption and neocolonialism which are delivered whenever and wherever he finds an audience. I left Anguilla exhausted, injured (having sprained an ankle following Bankie as he leaped across a ditch), and hooked.
We returned to film the 30th anniversary of Bankie’s Moonsplash festival a month later only to have COVID-19 bring the world to a halt. Bankie pushed through in spite of cancellations and faced the ensuing crisis with an equanimity born of familiarity with catastrophe, having lost everything repeatedly to hurricanes. The silver lining to the 17-month hiatus that followed is that I had time to reflect upon Bankie’s greater relevance. A global pandemic collided with an explosive movement asserting the value of Black lives, and through this seismic disruption, Bankie – a Black man raised by a single mother, who forsook stability to pursue a dream, who sings his truth fearlessly, and who seeks to instill in his children and grandchildren both a reverence for this land passed down from his father and a desire to protect its natural beauty from encroaching development and climate crisis – carried on. Gordon and I both hoped to expose new audiences to Bankie’s music, of course, but it suddenly felt as important to share this portrait of visionary stubbornness and resilience.
“Self-determination,” Bankie’s son Olaide responded when asked what single word best describes his father. In today’s fraught climate, it’s both healing and inspirational to hitch a ride with Bankie, who, in spite of the obstacles in his path, never ever doubted that his life and artistic vision matter. I hope his story and music will inspire other dreamers to stay the course.
photo credit: Matt Sutton