This Friday night at Barry University’s Andreas center, check out the debut of the Maroon Chronicles—a heart-thumping featurette produced by the creative forces at Carnival Arts and written by teens from the Miami Bridge youth crisis shelter.

According to the program notes, the Maroon Chronicles  is about two teenagers in love who are abducted from a Senegalese village and sold to separate plantations in the Caribbean. They make friends, escape, find each other in the mountains, and form a maroon (runaway slave) community. However, the notes only tell half of the story.

What’s amazing about this film is the nine month journey making the Chronicles. It wasn’t easy. Celeste Fraser Delgado, Director of the Carnival Arts program, says, “the biggest challenge in Carnival Arts is that the artists, volunteers, and youth are all constantly changing. We meet twice a week, year round. Yet the teens stay at the shelter for an average of 30 days (though some can be there for several months), so we never know from one session to the next who will come.”

Despite (or maybe because of) the constant change, this featurette comes together because of the strength of the community of artists involved in the project, including videographer and production designer Damian Rojo, visual and performance artist Maritza Molina, choreographers Afua Hall, Neri Torres, and Augusto Soledad. Plus, singers and drummers Jan Sebon, Surzelle Bertrand, and Kenneth Metzker, 70 plus Barry student volunteers and, finally, Celeste Fraser Delgado.

Interesting note: the featurette was woven together out of several short videos that emerged out of workshops in which the Miami Bridge teens recorded live performances. (See clip .)

The traditions of carnival are what holds this movie together. Delgado says that “every carnival tradition has stock characters represented by masks that are played by different people every year. In the movie, several actors played the same character, depending on who was there [from the youth shelter] when we were shooting — but the mask of each character remained the same.”

The Carnival Arts program is about celebrating life in a time of crisis. In fact, many of the youth who participated in this project are going through a “crisis so grave they cannot live at home with their families.” In a sense, this transformational featurette provides a creative outlet, a way to connect, or disconnect, from the realities of daily life for the teens involved in the project.

“We try to help them celebrate their lives and themselves despite this. It is often hard to inspire the teens to participate at first, but often we end the session caught up in the pure joy of singing, dancing, drumming, and making art.”

Get caught up in the pure joy of the Maroon Chronicles. The movie runs for 40 minutes and the screening will be followed by live performance led by Augusto Soledade of Brazz Dance.

Friday, September 24 at 8pm. Event begins at 7pm. 111 Andreas, Barry University Campus. For more information contact Celeste Fraser Delgado at 305.754.4305.