The lives of the African slave trade to  the struggle of an impoverished priest form part of the line up of this year’s Panorama films. Bigger Than Africa follows the trans-Atlantic slave trade route from West Africa to six different countries – USA, Nigeria, Brazil, Republic of Benin, Trinidad and Tobago and Cuba to explore and find reasons for the survival of this particular West African Culture.  This 90 minutes Documentary Feature from Director Oluwatoyin Ibrahim Adekeye shows that the most pronounced African Culture of the Diasporas remains the culture of the Yorubas.

Sharon Lewis’s enthralling film Brown Girl Begins, based on a prequel to Nalo Hopkinson’s novel, imagines the post-apocalyptic Toronto where Ti-Jeanne, a young reluctant priestess, must resurrect ancient Caribbean spirits to save her people and survive the possession ritual that killed her mother.

Also in the ttff/18 line up is Johnny 100 Pesos, a film featuring the lead Johnny who is released from jail after serving twenty years and one day for a heist and double murder. Despite trying to turn over a new leaf he ends up participating in a kidnapping plot to recover a large ransom.

Mama, a Colombian film features Victoria who is a reserved and independent woman who enjoys her solitude. She has an unexpected visit from her long-lost daughter Sara, who asks her to take care of her 7-year-old granddaughter for a couple of days. This favour will completely change her life. After a shocking event and unforeseen news, Sara comes back home to make things right with her mother.

In the Documentary film, Run Free, a group of young men from Parade Gardens, Jamaica embark on a journey of transformation using Parkour and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey.

 

 

The lives of two great revolutionary thinkers and writers feature in this year’s Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival (ttff) as part of its programme of panorama films (world cinema), announced last week.
Among them is the much anticipated I Am Not Your Negro, by renowned Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, based on an unfinished manuscript by American civil rights activist and writer, James Baldwin. Also carded to screen at the Festival, which runs from 19-26 September, is Neruda – loosely based on a period in the life of Chilean poet and communist politician, Pablo Neruda.

In Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, the words of writer James Baldwin (read by Samuel L Jackson), link the lives of three American civil rights activists — Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, in a disturbingly topical indictment of racism and hatred in America.

The film takes as its starting point Baldwin’s manuscript, Remember This House, a moving, poetic and at times humorous memoir, that puts the spotlight on America’s history of irrational fear and denial of race inequality. Baldwin, who died in 1987, and whose disillusionment with the US led him to emigrate to Europe, saw America as steadfastly narrow-minded, with racism as the source of its emotional and moral poverty.
Neruda covers the roughly 13 months that the poet spent in hiding from political persecution, before escaping to Argentina. Pablo Neruda was a communist party politician in 1948, when then President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla betrayed his leftist roots and aligned himself with the US’s war on communism. In an instant Neruda lost his high-powered allies and was forced into hiding.