Sidney Poitier, 007, Pirates and fiasco
The Bahamas owes its fame in the international 7th art to four factors. The first is of course Sidney Poitier, Bahamian actor and ambassador of the Bahamas. Son of a tomato farmer, Poitier flew to the United States at the age of 15 and joined the prestigious Actors Studio organization. First nominated for an Oscar in 1958 for his role in The Chain, he received the Best Actor Award in 1964 for The Lily of the Field, becoming the first black actor to win the Oscar. He won the Life Achievment Award in 1992. He died on January 6, 2022
In a completely different register, an emblematic figure of the cinema participates in putting the Bahamas in the spotlight: the secret agent James Bond. Indeed, on many occasions, the various interpreters of the famous 007 (from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig) walk the white sand beaches of the islands of the archipelago. Most of the exterior scenes of Operation Thunder (you can visit the famous cave of this film by snorkeling, just in front of Staniel Cay) and Casino Royale, for example, are shot in the Bahamas. For the anecdote, Sean Connery, fell in love with the archipelago and bought a property on New Providence. It is there that he will die on October 31, 2020
Another famous saga taking advantage of the sumptuous Bahamian panoramas: Pirates of the Caribbean, whose2nd and3rd parts were filmed between White Cay and Grand Bahama Island, near Gold Rock Beach (Lucayan National Park)
More recently, the Bahamas are in spite of themselves under the spotlights of the whole world because of the fiasco of the Fyre Festival. Considered one of the biggest scams, the event is the focus of two hit documentaries in 2019: Fyre Fraud (Hulu) and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (Netflix).
Land of filming
Among the most famous films that have part of their shooting in the Bahamas are also : Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (by Stuart Paton in 1916 and Richard Fleischer in 1954), The Wild Man (1975, Jean-Paul Rappeneau), Splash (1984, Ron Howard where the famous Stuart Cove can be seen, also present in many works), The Big Blue (Luc Besson, 1988), Holidays in the Tropics (2001, by Steve Purcell) and Bleu d'Enfer (2005, by John Stockwell) with Paul Walker, Jessica Alba and Josh Brolin. More recently, let us mention Disney's À la poursuite de demain (2015) with Georges Clooney and Hugh Laurie as well as L'Odyssée (2016) by Jérôme Salle with Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. It is a portrait of Jacques-Yves Cousteau (camped by Wilson), also focusing on his relationship with his youngest son, Philippe Cousteau (Niney).
