Seventeen Colours and a Sitar

A visual and sonic Caribbean feast featuring British born painter Rex Dixon and Trinidadian sitarist Mungal Patasar.

Seventeen Colours and a Sitar is a riveting explosion of paint and music. In this beautifully crafted film, British born painter Rex Dixon and Trinidadian musician Mungal Patasar explore musical interpretations of colour and visual imagery that deal specifically with the journey between India and the Caribbean. Dixon produced a series of paintings based on a trip to India in 2010 and the India trained classical sitarist Patasar writes original music that is inspired by these paintings.

The film features original pieces created on-screen by both Dixon and Patasar who discover common threads in their work. The film is shot in an experimental art documentary style, ‘Seventeen Colours and a Sitar’ and gives a one of a kind opportunity for viewers to see two artists from two seemingly opposed genres (a western abstract expressionist artist and an oriental trained classical sitarist) explore the similarities and differences in their processes of making their art, and to demonstrate the fusion between two disparate art movements before the camera. The Caribbean landscape provides a canvas and sounding board for their explorations of colour and tonality and explodes on film as a marriage between intuitive and experimental ways of working.

Filmed in high definition, with dreamscape appearance by the 3 Canal musical trio who join Dixon in his studio to put their song to painting, the film engages with the creolized identities that emerge from the Caribbean landscape which offers a diverse palette that feeds their intuitive and experimental ways of working.

Film Stills

Image Caption: Featured image for ‘Seventeen Colours and a Sitar’. Image Caption: Featured image for ‘Seventeen Colours and a Sitar’.

Seventeen Colours and a Sitar (2010)

Short (35mins) Documentary

Region:

Trinidad and Tobago

Language:

English

Rating:

PG

Producer(s):

Patricia Mohammed

Director(s):

Patricia Mohammed | Michael Mooleedhar

Cast:

Rex Dixon | Mungal Patasar | Wendell Manwarren | Roger Roberts |  Stanton Kewley | Karen Dass


Patricia Mohammed

Patricia Mohammed

Patricia Mohammed is a professor of gender and cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad. Among her publications is Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation (2010). She has made a number of short films including Sign of the Loa (2007) and Coolie Pink and Green (2009), which won the People’s Choice Award for Best Short Film at the ttff/09.

Michael Mooleedhar

Patricia Mohammed

Michael Mooleedhar is a graduate of the BA in Film Programme of the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. His short film The Queens of Curepe was screened at the ttff/08, and he edited Patricia Mohammed’s Coolie Pink and Green (2009). He is currently at work on a short drama, The Cool Boys.

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