Picture This: The Harder They Come

A special screening of the film that brought reggae music to the world and made the late Jimmy Cliff a global icon. Professor Mychal Odom of Mesa College will facilitate a Q&A session after the film. 

Registration encouraged.  Please scroll down!

Blessed with one the best soundtracks ever put on film, The Harder They Come is a gritty and razor sharp vision of working class life in Jamaica, a ground-breaking film that demonstrated that music and art can change the world.  Jimmy Cliff who died in 2025 plays Ivan, a young songwriter who leaves the country for the big city to find his fortune. His dreams of making it in the music business and his battles with crooked promoters, religious conservatives and criminals on both sides of the law make him a folk hero.

Shot in 1972 at the dawn of the blaxpoitation era in American movies following the success of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Shaft, and Super Fly, this Jamaican film is a significant achievement in the development, in the 1970s, of both an international Black popular culture and worldwide Black independent film movement. 

Professor Odom teaches in the Black Studies Department at Mesa College. His research emphasis is in the history of Pan-African and Black internationalist social movements. He’s the author of many articles including the recently published “The Home of Afro-American Music: Los Angeles and the Creation of Hugh Masekela’s Anticolonial Sound” and co-editor of the forthcoming book, Reparations In California: Understanding Historical and Present-Day Efforts towards Actualizing Repair and Redress for Black People. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled “From Southern California to Southern Africa: Translocal Black Internationalism in Los Angeles and San Diego from Civil Rights to Antiapartheid, 1960 to 1994.”