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The trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff) wants you!

We are looking for volunteers for the ninth edition of the Festival, which takes place from 16-30 September 2014.

We welcome people of all ages who love movies and who share a commitment to supporting the growth of a vibrant film culture here in Trinidad and Tobago.

As a volunteer, you will receive an official Festival pass that gives you free access to film screenings, an official T-shirt and as much verbal appreciation as we can muster.

You’ll also get the chance to meet filmmakers and other film industry professionals from the region and around the world.

In short, we can promise you an exciting experience you won’t soon forget.

If all this sounds like something you’d love to be a part of, then fill out the online application form here.

We can’t wait to welcome you to our team!

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In an effort to support the promotion of human rights in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean, Amnesty International (AI) and the trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff) have established a human rights film prize.

The Amnesty International Human Rights Prize will be awarded annually to the maker of the Caribbean film screened at ttff which best highlights a human rights issue. The inaugural prize will be handed out at the ttff/14, which takes place from 16 to 30 September this year.

“Talking about human rights issues, whether through films or other creative arts, is an important way to build a culture of respect for rights and encourage greater activism in the defense of rights,” said Chiara Sangiorgio, Campaigner, Global Thematic Programming at Amnesty International.

“We are delighted at the opportunity of partnering with the ttff, whose work in developing the film industry in the region we have been following with great admiration.”

Both fiction and documentary feature-length films will be considered for the prize. The winner will be chosen, by a jury, from a shortlist.

In addition to receiving a trophy, the winning filmmaker will also be given a cash prize of TT$5000. The ttff and AI will also seek to assist the winning film in getting screened as widely as possible throughout the region.

“We are honoured that Amnesty International has chosen to partner with us in spreading the message of human rights in the Caribbean,” said Jonathan Ali, the ttff’s Editorial Director. “Film is a powerful tool, and used effectively can positively influence the way people see and think about the world they live in.”

Amnesty International is a global movement of more than three million supporters, members and activists in over 150 countries and territories. The organisation exposes human rights violations and campaigns for justice around the world. It is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion, and is funded mainly by its membership and public donations.

The ttff is an annual celebration of films from and about Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean and its diaspora. The Festival seeks to facilitate the growth of the region’s film industry by hosting workshops, panel discussions, seminars, conferences and networking opportunities.

Photo caption: From left: James Burke, Caribbean Team Researcher, Amnesty International; Jonathan Ali, Editorial Director, ttff; and Chiara Sangiorgio, Campaigner – Global Thematic Programme, Amnesty International share a joke at the ttff’s offices while signing the memorandum of agreement to establish the Amnesty International Human Rights Prize

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The ttff, in collaboration with the US Embassy, is pleased to host an informal talk on the early history of cinema and the appreciation of film at its offices at 199 Belmont Circular Road, Belmont on Tuesday 17 June at 6.30pm.

Ms Leslie J Taubman, PhD, will give the talk, which is entitled “Cinema as Art: An Introduction to the History and Appreciation of Film”. The event—which will last approximately an hour—is free of charge, and everyone is invited.

Beginning in 1895, when brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière of France held the first public film screenings, cinema has entranced the world. Yet cinema as we know it now did not always exist, and the art form—considered the “seventh art”—has undergone many changes since the Lumières first showed their short, silent, black-and-white films to astonished Parisian audiences.

Interspersing her talk with fascinating clips from early film history, Ms Taubman will speak about some of the pioneers of cinema. These include not only including the Lumières but also Georges Méliès, another Frenchman. (A fictionalised version of Méliès appears in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film Hugo, about the early days of cinema.)

Ms Taubman’s talk will take her up to the momentous year 1927—when sound was introduced and cinema changed forever.

About the speaker

Leslie J Taubman, PhD, a Fulbright Scholar in Barbados (2008-2009), developed the Film Studies programme at the University of the West Indies and was president of the jury of the Barbados International Film Festival. She holds an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University and her PhD in Communications-Cinema from the University of Southern California. In 2010, Ms Taubman was a post-doctoral Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, and has been an Adjunct Associate Professor at Fordham University in New York. She has written for many publications, including the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter. She has given talks on cinema in numerous countries around the world.

Image: A shot from Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902)

When Calypso Rose visited West Africa several years ago, admiring audiences gave her the name “the Lioness of the Jungle”.

Eventually that name would work its way into the title of a documentary film being made at the time about Rose, born McCartha Lewis in 1940 in Bethel, Tobago.

Entitled Calypso Rose: Lioness of the Jungle, the documentary, which is 85 minutes long, will be screened free of charge by the ttff on Friday 20 June from 7pm, at the Little Carib Theatre in Woodbrook.

The screening is sponsored by the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company as part of the T&T Film Nights series, and is one of the events in the first-ever Street Arts Festival, being presented by the Trinidad and Tobago Coalition of Services Industries on June 21 and 22.

The Street Arts Festival is an initiative designed to promote various sectors of the creative industry, including film, fashion, music and the visual and performing arts.

Calypso Rose: Lioness of the Jungle was released in 2011 and is an intimate portrait of an extraordinary woman, the first to win both the Road March and Calypso Monarch (then known as the Calypso King) titles.

Now 50 years into her career, Rose has composed hundreds of songs and recorded dozens of albums, and been an inspiration to countless women calypsonians and soca singers. A number of these women, like Destra and Denyse Plummer, are interviewed in Lioness of the Jungle.

Directed by Cameroon-born, Paris-based filmmaker Pascale Obolo, the film is a travelogue of sorts, tracking Rose from Paris, where she is recording an album, to her native Tobago and Trinidad. The film then follows Rose to New York, where she lives, and finally to her ancestral homeland, Africa, with which she maintains a fierce connection.

Along the way we see many facets of Rose and learn of the great personal struggles she had to overcome, and come closer to understanding the woman behind the powerful public persona.

RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion 2014
Presented by ttff + RBC Royal Bank
23–27 September 2014
Application deadline: July 11

The trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff), in association with RBC Royal Bank, invites applications for the fourth annual RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion.

Mission and objective
RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion is an intensive development programme that provides ten selected filmmakers from the Caribbean and its diaspora with the opportunity to learn from internationally respected filmmakers and other film professionals. It will be held from 23-27 September 2014, during ttff/14 (16–30 September).

Focus will include group discussions on a range of topics concentrating on the artistic side of narrative filmmaking, sharpening the skills and abilities of participants. There will be a particular emphasis on enhancing the filmmakers’ creative voice and storytelling capabilities.

Each filmmaker will enter Focus with a concept for a feature-length narrative film, from which they will be expected to develop a detailed treatment.

Pitch session and competition
At the end of Focus, all participants will be given an opportunity to pitch their project to a jury at a public event at the ttff/14. The participant with the best project and pitch, as determined by the jury, will win a prize to be determined.

Eligibility
Focus is open to Caribbean filmmakers (citizens of Caribbean countries living and working in the Caribbean); filmmakers of the diaspora (persons of Caribbean descent resident outside of the Caribbean who intend to shoot at least part of their prospective project in the region); and international filmmakers living and working in the Caribbean. Applicants must have completed at least one narrative film (short or feature-length), but no more than two narrative features, as a screenwriter and/or director.

Applications
All applicants must submit a maximum three-minute excerpt of a previous film (narrative short or feature) via Vimeo link, stating their role(s) on the film (writer and/or director). They must also submit their résumé and a cover letter stating, in no more than 100 words, the concept of the project they would be bringing to Focus and what makes it unique. Participants will be determined based on the strength of all three of these items.

Applications should be sent via email to focus@ttfilmfestival.com

The deadline for applications is 5pm EST on Friday, 11 July, 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by 01 August.

Expenses
All selected participants will be provided with the materials for the Immersion, lunch, a Festival pass (which provides access to all film screenings and industry events), and invitations to Festival-related activities. Participants not residing in T&T will be allocated accommodation (inclusive of breakfast), and local transport to and from Festival-related activities.

Image: Shakirah Bourne of Barbados, winner of the 2013 RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion pitch session, pitching her eventual prize-winning project, Two Smart, at ttff/13

As a boy growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, Richard Fung loved dhalpuri roti. As a filmmaker now living in Toronto, he decided to discover the origins of this justly celebrated dish.

Richard’s journey took him first from Canada to his native land. He then headed to the Bhojpur region of India, where the ancestors of the majority of people of Indian descent in T&T came from. Finally he made his way back to the snowy streets of Toronto, where a sizeable Caribbean community lives.

All the while Richard filmed his epic quest. The end result was the documentary Dal Puri Diaspora, an eye-opening and richly enjoyable 80-minute tribute to a unique culinary invention that has travelled the world.

Dal Puri Diaspora had its world premiere at the trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff) in 2012, and was rapturously received by audiences. Now the Festival presents it again, free of charge, on Saturday 7 June from 7pm at the St James Amphitheatre, as part of the annual We Beat festival.

The screening is sponsored by the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company (TTFC) and presented in association with the St James Community Improvement/We Beat Committee. This is the fourth year that the ttff will present a film during the We Beat celebrations.

According to Melvina Hazard, ttff Director of Community Development, “This screening is a perfect mix of occasion, venue and subject, since We Beat celebrates our culture and St James has a longstanding tradition of street roti sales.”

As if to emphasise this point, one of the most popular roti sellers in St James is featured in Dal Puri Diaspora.

In an interview with Xfinity TV blog Richard recounted some of his discoveries in making the film. “What’s intriguing is that the West Indian roti is something that is intensely regional in India, only eaten at certain times and not commonly sold on the street,” he said.

“In Kolkata dhalpuris are more commonly available than in Bihar,” he continued. “Yet in the southern Caribbean it became the most widely eaten ‘Indian’ food, and in the Caribbean diaspora it has become the most commonly consumed dish. So not only has the dish changed, but its very identity.”

As a result, the documentary tracks dhalpuri’s remarkable passage across space and time, linking colonialism, migration and the globalisation of tastes.

Dal Puri Diaspora also features interviews with leading scholars and food writers, including Brinsley Samaroo and Patricia Mohammed of Trinidad and Tobago, and Pushpesh Pant and Radhika Mongia of India.

Admission to the St James Amphitheatre to see Dal Puri Diaspora is free. There will be refreshments on sale.

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Teneille Newallo is a writer, producer and actress from Trinidad and Tobago. Recently, she was selected as one of two local women filmmakers (the other was Juliette McCawley) to attend the Birds Eye View Film Festival in London, an international festival dedicated to women filmmakers, courtesy the British Council. Here Newallo talks briefly with ttff editorial director Jonathan Ali about her experience.

Jonathan Ali: How did you come to be selected to attend the Birds Eye View Film Festival?

Teneille Newallo: The trinidad+tobago film festival gave me a call and told me the British Council had contacted them and were looking for two female filmmaker delegates to send to Birds Eye View, to represent female filmmakers from Trinidad and Tobago. I was selected to be one of the two, to be fully funded by the British Council.

JA: Had you heard of Birds Eye View before?

TN: I actually had not. When I looked it up I realised that it was actually doing some fantastic things for women filmmakers. It appeared to have a good attendance, which proved be true when I went there. It was very well organised.

JA: Could you say something about the festival itself? The mission?

TN: The mission of the festival is to promote women filmmakers from around the world, since the majority of filmmakers internationally are men—over ninety per cent I believe. So it’s basically to encourage female filmmakers, so that they have their own voice as well in the filmmaking market.

JA: What did the festival comprise of?

TN: They showed international shorts, they had British shorts, they showed feature films, and they were all either produced, written or directed by women. The festival also gives women filmmakers a lot of opportunities to meet with one another and hear and share different stories from their filmmaking experiences, some of which would be unique compared to men. It gave us the opportunity to share our work with one another as well, and network with distributors, people that run different film festivals internationally, things like that.

JA: You went to Birds Eye View with a project you’re working on. Could you say something about the project, and what the response was like?

TN: I went with a feature fiction project called The Cutlass, which is based on the true story of a kidnapping of a Trinidadian woman in a Trinidadian forest by a sociopath. At the end of the entire festival is when we actually shared our films with one another, after we’d gotten to know one another very well. We all only had six minutes to share whatever we wanted. So I decided I would show the first six minutes of our film, and when my time was up, nobody wanted to stop it [laughs]. They wanted to keep watching to see what happens next. They were all very interested and we all decided to keep in touch to share our work and keep supporting one another.

JA: What did you find most eye-opening about the festival?

TN: That women are very talented filmmakers, and there are quite a few of us! More than I expected. Looking at some of the short films I was highly impressed. Obviously they selected the best of the best for the festival, but there was some terrific work that blew me away, and that was just among the British shorts. And just learning from women that have been in the industry for a while. We watched Bhaji on the Beach (1994) by Gurinder Chadha [director of Bend it like Beckham]. She was there, with the cast. It was lovely to see a pioneer woman filmmaker like her come so far and watch that film—even though it was made so long ago it’s still incredible. It had the audience in stiches.

JA: What happens now for you and your film?

Our main priority right now is raising the rest of the funds we need to shoot the feature, which we’re well on our way to doing. A lot of good things came out of this trip, but the best thing was meeting a distributor, Soda Pictures, possibly interested in our film and in distributing it throughout the UK. [Soda Pictures are the distributors of ttff/13 opening film Half of a Yellow Sun.]

TN: Finally, any advice for young women filmmakers out there?

I would first off say don’t even consider yourself a woman filmmaker, just consider yourself a filmmaker. Work hard. It’s not an easy industry to be in so you have to love what you’re doing. You have to do your research, you have to put your hard work into it. Nothing’s going to fall out of the sky for you. You might have to work a tad bit harder, being a woman, but don’t even put yourself in that mindset. Do the hard work and everything will fall into place.

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The European Film Festival (EFF) of Trinidad and Tobago is now less than two weeks away. The EFF, which is presented in association with the trinidad+tobago film festival, runs from May 14–27 at MovieTowne, Port of Spain and May 21–27 at MovieTowne, Tobago.

Brochures for the EFF containing the list of films in this year’s programme, plus the screening dates, times and ratings, are now available free of charge at the locations below. This list will be updated as more locations are added.

MovieTowne Port of Spain
MovieTowne Chaguanas
MovieTowne Tobago
Nalis, Port of Spain (National Library)
Nalis, Chaguanas (Chaguanas Public Library, Centre Point Mall)
Nalis, San Fernando (Carnegie Free Library, Harris Promenade)
Veni Mangé restaurant, Ariapita Avenue, Port of Spain
Alliance française, 17 Alcazar Street, St Clair
The French & Spanish Embassies, Tatil Building, Maraval Road, Port-of-Spain
The UK High Commission & German Embassy, 19 St Clair Avenue, St Clair
Office of the EU Delegation, Sagicor Financial Centre, Queen’s Park West 16, Port of Spain
The Reader’s Bookshop, 1 Middle Street, St James
Drink Lounge and Bistro, 63 Rosalino Street, Woodbrook
Paper Based Bookshop, Hotel Normandie, St Ann’s
Adam’s Bagels, Maraval Road
Trevor’s Edge bar, 1 St John’s Road, Saint Augustine
Martin’s Piano Bar, Woodford Street, Newtown
University of Trinidad and Tobago, NAPA campus, Port of Spain
Malabar Farms, Long Circular Road, Maraval
Medulla Art Gallery, 37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook
Tablespoon Coffee and Desert House, 79 Eastern Main Rd, St Augustine
The office of the Film Programme, University of the West Indies, Carmody Rd, St Augustine
The Spanish Department, University of the West Indies, St Augustine
The French Department, University of the West Indies, St Augustine
The Spanish Department, University of Trinidad and Tobago
Humzinger Juicebar and Kick-ass Kitchen, Maraval Road
Nigel R Khan Booksellers, Grand Bazaar and Trincity Mall
T&T Sailing Association, Chaguaramas
Scotiabank St James
Republic Bank, Long Circular Mall
Sagicor Financial Centre, Queen’s Park West 16, Port of Spain
Marriott Hotel, Port of Spain
Hyatt Hotel, Port of Spain
Kapok Hotel, Maraval

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A mesmerizing Spanish adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, made in the style of a classic, black-and-white silent film featuring Snow White as a beautiful bullfighter.

A gorgeously tender French animation, about a once-famous stage magician whose life is turned around when he befriends a poor orphan girl.

And a lavish and heartbreaking British drama, about love betrayed, inspired by Thomas Hardy’s great novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles—and set in modern-day India.

These three films—Blancanieves, L’Illusioniste and Trishna, respectively—are just some of the 26 films from 12 European countries audiences have to look forward to, as the 18^th annual European Film Festival (EFF) of Trinidad and Tobago gets set to take place.

As ever, the lineup of films for this year’s EFF is varied, with an inviting mix of dramas, thrillers, comedies, documentaries and children’s films. A number of the selected movies are award-winning titles by some of Europe’s top filmmakers.

“One of the aims of the EFF is to give local audiences a glimpse of the customs, history and culture of contemporary European society,” said Jacques Sturm, Ambassador of France, the 2014 coordinating mission of the EFF.

“Further, it is hoped that the films shown will rekindle the memories of past experiences in Europe for those who are already familiar with it, and to those who are not, hopefully increase their desire to visit, and discover its atmosphere and its people.”

In addition to the French embassy, the EFF is organised by the other European resident embassies in Port of Spain: Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the EU Delegation.

Once again, the EFF will partner with the trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff).

The EFF runs from 14–27 May at MovieTowne Port of Spain, with screenings at MovieTowne in Tobago happening from 21–27 May.

Tickets for all screenings are $30 each, with tickets for children and students (in uniform or with student ID) priced at $20.

For more information on the EFF, including the full schedule of films and screening dates and times, visit ttfilmfestival.com/eff, or European Film Festival – Trinidad and Tobago on Facebook.

 

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Members of the local filmmaking community are invited to attend a workshop on professional film production, facilitated by internationally experienced filmmaker Roma Zachemba.

Entitled How to Produce a Professional Film: The 1st Assistant Director’s Point of View, the workshop is designed to give directors and others working in film and TV production a thorough knowledge of the basics of working on a professional film set.

Topics to be covered include:

• The role of the assistant director
• Protocol on set
• Importance of the tech recce
• Schedule software
• Health & safety on set
• Risk assessment
• The call sheet
• The roles of 2nd & 3rd assistant directors

Roma Zachemba is an experienced, internationally trained assistant director with over 40 feature films, shorts, music videos and TV commercials to her name.

Her credits include the BAFTA-nominated film Keeping up with Joneses (2013), the internationally distributed film London Paris New York (2012), and the film festival-circuit winner Lunch Date (2012).

Now based in T&T, Ms Zachemba has previously worked in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland, among other countries.

The workshop takes place on Tuesday 22nd and Wednesday 23rd April, 5.30–8.30pm, at 199 Belmont Circular Road, Port of Spain. The cost is $500 (both days).

For further information contact: roma.zachemba@gmail.com

This workshop takes place with the assistance of the trinidad+tobago film festival.

Image: Roma Zachemba on set