SKINNING TEETH

In Trini parlance, to skin your teeth is to grin, to laugh, to find the joke even when life isn’t playing fair. This block gathers films that do exactly that – comedies of chaos and warmth in which humour becomes its own kind of resilience. A bickering family careens towards the hospital with a pregnant relative in ‘Bispu (On the eve)’, while in ‘Demonotic’ a Caribbean grandmother’s malfunctioning home AI turns a routine customer-service call into something far stranger and more sinister. In ‘Smile’, a grandson pieces together the mystery of a damaged burglar bar and, with it, a whole household’s lore; and in ‘My maxi too’, a teacher meets casual classroom homophobia with creativity, persistence, and good humour. Tenderness threads through as well: ‘The first film’ follows a girl in 1960s India who dreams of the cinema forbidden to her. Together, these shorts make the case for laughter as something we reach for not in spite of hardship, but right alongside it.