BIMFF 2.0 – All Star Line-up Set, Pre-Concerts

And while overnight tourist arrivals are looking optimistic, the official slow season for the industry is setting in. One of the Belize Tourism Board’s efforts to boost tourism in the slow season is the Belize International Music and Food Festival. The first event of its kind was held in San Pedro in 2022. The event returns this year and in its second edition, the festival is coming to the Marion Jones Sporting Complex in Belize City. The official line-up of international artists have been announced and show is slated for July twenty-ninth and thirtieth. Following last year’s concerns, what will be the involvement of Belizean artists on stage? Well, a few weeks ago, a pre-festival tour was launched as the Belize Tourism Board, where they are looking for the best of the best to make the cut for the festival. Today, B.T.B.’s Director of Industry Development Josue Carballo gave an update, promising that this year’s event will be spectacular.

Josue Carballo

Josue Carballo, Director of Industry Development, B.T.B.

“We are getting Rotimi, afro beats, very popular and some of the presentations he did in Power. And then no other than Spice with Ruff Cut Band, one of the best bands out of Jamaica and the legendary Morgan Heritage. And that is just night one. Night one is gonna be really packed with a lot of activities. Day two, we are going to have a host of five different soca artists, including Skinny Fabulous, Lyrikal, Adam O, Jadel, Erphassn Alves and we are closing off with a big name, big performer, Busy Signal. And that is just the international component of it. I must mention that we are gonna be getting the best performances from every district. Right now, we have started our pre-festival jam tour and out of the seven different stops, we have already selected three of the performers, winners of these festivals and we are going to do the next one on May thirteenth in San Ignacio. We decided this year that we are going to make it open, we want to find the best talent – not only the names that we usually know; we have a lot of them performing, but we wanted to go out to the districts and we have had open competitions where everyone can sign up and base on that we pick the best performance judge-wise and we also have a category called popular demand where people will be able to vote, text in and support their favourite artist. This will be huge because the food festival starts from eleven in the morning, both Saturday and Sunday from eleven until three. We gonna have live performances during the food festival and then we are going to switch right into the concert from six until all the performances finish.”