Emiel Martens is a film scholar-practitioner with a particular focus on Jamaica’s film history and the connections with the island’s tourism and colonial histories. He currently serves as Assistant Professor in Postcolonial Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Martens is also the Founding Director of Caribbean Creativity, a non-profit organization that, since 2008, is committed to the programming and promotion of Caribbean cinema, and Co-Founding Director of the Expertise Centre Humanitarian Communication (HuCom) as well as the Erasmus Knowledge Centre for Film Heritage and Tourism (FiHeTo). Finally, Martens is an independent filmmaker involved in research-based impact films such as Welcome to the Smiling Coast (2016) and Gifts from Babylon (2018). During his tenure as a Visiting Research Fellow at CARIMAC, Martens will mainly focus on developing an interactive map and documentary series on Jamaica’s film history, provisionally titled Film Location Jamaica.

Find Emiel Online

https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/m/a/e.s.martens/e.s.martens

https://www.linkedin.com/in/emielmartens

Recent publications (selection)

Martens, Emiel. “A Fifty-Year History of the Jamaican Urban Crime Film: Tracing the Reggae-Ghetto Aesthetics from The Harder They Come to Yardie.” Jamaican Art and Design, edited by Emma Roberts (2025). Abingdon and New York: Routledge, forthcoming.

Martens, Emiel, and Edmund Onwuliri. “Exploring the Nexus of Film and Tourism in Nigeria: A Decade of Destination Nollywood, 2012–2022.” Journal of Global Perspectives in Communication and Media 1.1 (2025): 7–12.

Available at: https://journalofgpcm.wixsite.com/global-perspective-1

Martens, Emiel. “Film, Tourism and Empire in Early Twentieth-Century Jamaica: The Runaway Production of A Daughter of the Gods.” In Media, Place and Tourism: Worlds of Imagination, edited by Stijn Reijnders et al. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2024. pp. 21–41.

Available at: https://www.routledge.com/Media-Place-and-Tourism-Worlds-of-Imagination/...

Reijnders, Stijn, Emiel Martens, Apoorva Nanjangud, Deborah Castro, Rosa Schiavone, and Débora Póvoa, eds. Media, Place and Tourism: Worlds of Imagination. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2024.

Available at: https://www.routledge.com/Media-Place-and-Tourism-Worlds-of-Imagination/...

Martens, Emiel. “The Failing Promise of the Audio-visual Industries for National Development: The History of Seventy Years of Film Policy in Jamaica, 1948–2018.” Creative Industries Journal (2023): 1–28.

Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17510694.2023.2223379

Robinson, Rebecca, and Emiel Martens. “Filmmaking in the Caribbean: A Final Interview with Franklyn ‘Chappie’ St Juste.” Caribbean Quarterly: A Journal of Caribbean Culture 69.1 (2023): 92–103.

Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00086495.2023.2194210

Martens, Emiel. “The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’.” Humanities 10.62 (2021): 1–26.

Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/2/62

Martens, Emiel. “A Daughter of the Gods (1916): Film, Tourism and Empire on Location in Jamaica.” Journal for Media History 23.1–2 (2020): 1–40.

Available at: https://www.tmgonline.nl/articles/10.18146/tmg.599