At the recently concluded T&T Film Festival, there was a renewed focus on local films. Green Days By the River, a local feature based on the Michael Anthony novel, opened the Festival and is still running at cinemas. There was also a fantastic response to short films like Maya Cozier’s Short Drop and Shari Petti’s Sorf Hair. Away from the glare of the Festival spotlight, however, there was an extremely important educational event taking place. The British Council teamed up with the T&T Film Festival to host development training for filmmakers in the form of a scriptwriting workshop with British script development consultant Ludo Smolski.

The British Council Caribbean has been carrying out a number of programmes in T&T over the last few months. The council’s Caribbean Arts manager Annalee Davis said the implementation of these programmes was a part of establishing and continuing cultural relations between the UK and the Caribbean.

She said it’s about demonstrating that the UK has something to share and something to learn when it comes to the arts, the creative economy and cultural industries.

One project is a script development workshop which was carried out in partnership with the T&T Film Festival from March 8-12, facilitated by international script development consultant, Ludo Smolski. Davis said this workshop was implemented in response to concerns from stakeholders in the T&T film industry that there are issues around writing, script development, script editing and story editing. “Rather than just imposing a programme, we wanted to build relationships with entities on the ground who know what their needs are and partner with them to shape programming that fits the local context.”

In addition to the workshop, Davis said there was a mentoring component built into the programme so that it will continue when Smolski returns to the UK.

Another initiative is a creative journalism workshop in partnership with the NGC Bocas Literary Festival. Davis said it has been suggested that there is a lack of writing about the arts for general audiences, and it would be useful “to provide journalists who are writing about the arts or have an interest in the arts some of the specificities around the various arts”.

SIXTEEN local film-makers and writers have been selected to participate in the British Council’s script development workshop, to be held in partnership with the trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff).

The participants were chosen after an open call for applications, in which they had to submit their own script or write a critique of someone else’s.

The selection panel comprised a representative of the British Council, the ttff and an independent adjudicator. In keeping with the British Council’s transparency policies, the identity of the applicants remained unknown to the judges until their final selections were made.