Words by Jesse Serwer

We’ve been looking forward for a while to Fire in Babylon, the reggae- and calypso-soundtracked documentary about the history-making West Indies cricket teams of the 1970s and ’80s that’s been making the festival rounds abroad. Starting this week, British director Stevan Riley’s movie will make its US debut with four screenings at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, before fanning out to theaters across the UK next month, and we hear it may soon be coming to U.S. theaters and TV as well (Read below for more on that). LargeUp caught up with London–based Riley just after his return from the film’s Jamaican launch in Kingston earlier this month for a chat about Caribbean film audiences, cricket-inspired calypsonians, the bone-shattering, female-exciting power of six-ounce cork balls bowled at 100 miles an hour, and the symbolic depth of the West Indian team’s 20-year-long dominance of the “the gentleman’s game.”