Meet Our Programmers

Compelling, culturally relevant film programming is a cornerstone of TTFF. Our TTFF/25 programmers are guided by a clear principle: to unapologetically centre the Caribbean by curating the best new films from our region.

In selecting this year’s programmers, we’re actively embedding our pan Caribbean-ness by reaching out across our region to the English-, French- and Spanish-Caribbean. We’re delighted to introduce our TTFF/25 programmers!

 

  • Ivonne Cotorruelo, our senior programmer, is from Cuba
  • Wally Fall is from Martinique
  • Farrah Rahaman is from Trinidad and Tobago

Ivonne Cotorruelo

Ivonne Cotorruelo is a Cuban film programmer and cultural worker whose practice is situated at the crossroads of film curation, research, and collective experience. She is a first-year PhD student at the University of Connecticut, where her work explores queer Latin American cinema through a phenomenological lens, attending to the active and embodied ways film moves through and with its audiences.

Ivonne has worked across festivals committed to independent and underrepresented voices, with current roles as Senior Programmer for the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival (TTFF), Iberoamerican Programmer for the Miami Film Festival (MFF), and Features Programmer for the Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF). Her previous curatorial work includes Outfest LA, Aspen ShortFest, and the Atlanta Film Festival, alongside jury and review work for initiatives such as Chicken & Egg Pictures, Film Independent Media Markers, WarnerMedia New Voices, and the Black and Latino Inclusion Fellowship. A Berlinale Talents alumna, her curatorial ethos is shaped by questions of proximity and encounter – how we come to films, and how they come to us – with a deep investment in fostering spaces of visibility, relation, and shared resonance.

 

Wally Fall

Wally Fall is a Martinican-Senegalese filmmaker. His films confront the notions of identity, history and belonging from a Caribbean perspective. He co-founded the Cinemawon film collective in 2016, which works to give more visibility to films from Africa and the Afro-descendant diasporas of the world, which often go unnoticed on commercial circuits or at festivals. He lives in Guadeloupe and has been sharing his time between his filmmaking projects and curating films with organisations such as Festival Court Derrière (La Réunion), FICINE, APAN and FestCurtas BH (Brazil), BlackStar Film Festival (US) and Toile des Palmistes (French Guiana).

 

Farrah Rahaman

Farrah Rahaman is a cultural worker from San Fernando. She scaffolds academic research, cultural organizing, curation, and filmmaking to make meaning and chart her peoples in the long story of life on earth. Farrah is a PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania whose interdisciplinary methodology centers Caribbean women’s narratives, political and social imaginations, and visual culture.

Farrah was a part of the BlackStar Film Festival team for a decade, where she served as panel curator and producer, and has provided curatorial and research assistance on the exhibitions Assemblage, Lossless and Swarm: Terence Nance. She is currently producing Venus Flytrap, a performance series and installation for BlackStar Projects with the artist Joiri Minaya and curator Dessane Cassell Lopez. As the 2023-2024 Curator-in-Residence at Express Newark she mounted the film and video exhibition Things We Do in the Dark: Cinematic Experiments in Kinship which featured thirty video works from artists who engage in collaborative approaches to contemporary filmmaking.