The trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff) will end its activities for the year on a high note with a screening of the award-winning parang documentary La Gaita, followed by a live performance by the celebrated Lara Brothers parang group, on Saturday 8th December in Santa Cruz.

This free screening and performance will bring to an end the bpTT Community Cinergy series of film events held across the country in 2012.

Winner of the ttff/12 People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary, La Gaita profiles the Lara Brothers, the oldest existing parang group in T&T. The film, directed by Janine Fung, pays loving tribute to the band, telling their story in their own words and music. In particular, the film follows the gregarious, extroverted Willy Lara and his more reserved elder brother, the late Tito, whose moving funeral forms part of the film.

Speaking about her experience making the film, Fung noted that “The Lara Brothers have a responsibility—one they have taken on for the last 70 years—to serve their music, their faith and their country.”

She continued: “They are messengers, travelling from rumshop to rumshop throughout Trinidad performing, because they simply love parang, as a way to express themselves and for the people to relate to that expression.”

The film screening and live performance will be held at Baya’s Place, Chiquitto Drive, Sam Boucaud, Santa Cruz (next to the Brian Lara Grounds) from 7pm. Refreshments will be on sale.

The Green Screen Environmental Film Series, of which the trinidad+tobago film festival is a partner, continues this evening with a screening at the ttff offices, 199 Belmont Circular Road,from 6 pm. The films being screened are the documentaries The Fourth Revolution: Energy and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.

The first film, If a Tree Falls, is 85 minutes long and uses striking archival footage and intimate interviews with ELA members—and with the prosecutor and detective who were chasing them—to dramatically explore the tumultuous period from 1995 until early 2001 when environmentalists were clashing with timber companies and law enforcement in the US. It asks hard questions about environmentalism, activism, and the way we define terrorism.

Winner of the award for documentary editing at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, If a Tree Falls tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the Epanastatikos Laikos Agonas—Revolutionary Popular Struggle (ELA), the radical environmental group that the FBI calls America’s “number one domestic terrorist threat.”

The Fourth Revolution: Energy, is an 83-minute German documentary which shows a vision of a world where the energy is 100 per cent renewable. The 2010 movie calls for a revolution from capitalist ownership of energy to the democratisation of energy resources—instead of a few owners of energy, hundreds of thousands.

This screening is free and open to the public. For more information on Green Screen, find their page on Facebook.

Image: A still from If a Tree Falls