PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD, 29 September 2021 – Congratulations are in order for Trinidadian filmmaker Ayana Harper, who has won the 2021 trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff/21) People’s Choice Award. The results for the award were announced after voting and the last day of festival screenings on 28 September 2021.

Harper’s film The Interview, which depicts the challenges of a budding filmmaker struggling to find the right interviewee for a project, received the highest number of votes by ttff/21 audiences out of twenty-five screenings directed by Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) filmmakers.

The first runner-up for this year’s award was The Forgotten Boys – a documentary by director Alexandra Warner. The second runner-up was the student film, Going Knowhere, by Darielle Allard – both Trinidad and Tobago filmmakers.

The ttff reprised the People’s Choice Award category to help audiences positively impact the trajectories of T&T films and filmmakers. The 2021 People’s Choice Award winner, will receive a trophy and lots of kudos!

We’re excited to announce that there’ll be a people’s choice award winner for best Trinidad and Tobago film at ttff/21!

Voting is simple! Watch your chosen T&T film at ttfilmfestival.com. At the end of the film, a notification will appear on screen, letting you know if the film is eligible for audience awards. If it’s eligible, click either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ to register your vote! The winner will be announced at the end of the festival, and will receive a trophy.

Please take a minute to vote on the T&T films – people’s choice/ audience awards can make a big, positive difference to the trajectory of a film or filmmaker!

Get voting!

Here’s are the films vying for people’s choice:

Trinidad and Tobago films dominated the People’s Choice Awards at the trinidad+tobago film festival Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, September 26  with the film-viewing audience giving a resounding nod to Oliver Milne’s Salty Dog as the People’s Choice Best Short Film; Shari Petti’s Sorf Hair as People’s Choice Best Documentary and Michael Mooleedhar’s Green Days by the River as People’s Choice Best Narrative Feature.

Each received a TT$5,000 cash prize sponsored by Flow.

It was a great night for Green Days by the River as it also picked up the Jury Award for Best TT Feature Film, with a cash prize of TT$10,000 sponsored by the Ministry of Community Development, Culture, and the Arts.

The award-winning film God Loves the Fighter, a gritty urban drama by US-based, Trinidad and Tobago-born filmmaker Damian Marcano, will screen at We Beat’s We Film Night on Tuesday—in tribute to the late Earl Crosby.

The free screening, at the St James Amphitheatre, is presented by the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival (TTFF).

Hailed for its “non-conformist and thrilling voice” by the UK’s Candid magazine and for its “slick cinematography” by film magazine Variety, God Loves the Fighter played to sold-out audiences at the TTFF 2013 where it won the People’s Choice Award and the Best Local Feature Award. It also went on to win the 2014 Yellow Robin Award at the Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam, among others.

As its final event for the year, the trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff) is hosting a free screening of the documentary Songs of Redemption, on Tuesday 10 December, at its offices at 199 Belmont Circular Road in Belmont.

The screening takes place in association with Amnesty International, in observance of Human Rights Day.

Amnesty International is “a global movement of more than 3 million supporters, members and activists in over 150 countries and territories who campaign to end grave abuses of human rights”, and is “independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion.”

Human Rights Day was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1950. It seeks to bring attention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations.

Directed by Miquel Galofré and Amanda Sans, Songs of Redemption goes inside the General Penitentiary in Kingston, Jamaica, to document a remarkable programme that seeks to rehabilitate prisoners by allowing them to write, record and perform reggae music.

The film features extraordinarily candid and moving interviews with the inmates in the programme, some serving sentences for crimes as serious as murder. It climaxes with a powerful live concert within the prison.

A hit at ttff/13, Songs of Redemption won the audience prize for best documentary feature, and was co-winner of the jury prize for best documentary.

Preceding Songs of Redemption will be a short fiction film, Passage, winner of a special jury mention at ttff/13. Written and directed by Kareem Mortimer of the Bahamas, Passage tells the story of a group of Haitians, locked in the hold of a fishing vessel, who are being smuggled through Bahamian waters in the hopes of reaching the United States.

While the films have not been produced by Amnesty International, the global human rights organisation is supporting the event as it believes that a critical step towards the realisation of human rights is the promotion of a culture of rights—and debates on themes such as those highlighted in the films will certainly contribute to this aim. Materials highlighting recent work by Amnesty International in the Caribbean region will be available at the event.

The screenings begin at 7.30pm, and doors open at 6.30pm. Space is limited, so please arrive early to ensure seating. Refreshments will be available.

Image: a shot from Songs of Redemption