Vashti Anderson’s feature film Moko Jumbie will make its Trinidad premiere on September 23 at MovieTowne in a special appearance at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. It is a film that is already creating an international buzz. The film premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June where it got strong reviews and was screened last month for the opening night at the Mosaic International South Asian Film Festival in Canada and won the award for Best Screenplay.

Earlier this month it played for a very appreciative, large crowd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and soon will be at the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York. It will be the opening night film at the Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami later this month.

T&T-American filmmaker Vashti Anderson’s film Moko Jumbie will have its T&T premiere on September 23 during the T&T Film Festival. The annual festival runs September 19- 26 this year at various venues.

Exploring the old family estate by the sea in south Trinidad, Asha finds her Uncle Jagessar lamenting the state of the lemons.

Often, though, he’s more profound.

“Anything that can happen does happen,” he tells her, philosophising about parallel universes.

Sometimes those universes seem to overlap in Moko Jumbie, an oblique, dreamlike film, where the everyday life of a sleepy, remote village can encompass unexpected drama and romance and even the supernatural.

T&T-American filmmaker Vashti Anderson’s film Moko Jumbie will have its T&T premiere on September 23 during the T&T Film Festival. The annual festival runs September 19- 26 this year at various venues.

As part of the country’s celebration of Patriotism Month, the trinidad+tobago film festival will host Feature T+T—a day-long celebration of T&T through the screening of local short and feature films, followed by Q&A sessions with some of the filmmakers. The screenings—which will be held on Republic Day, Sunday 24 September, at MovieTowne Port-of-Spain, San Fernando and Tobago—are sponsored by the Ministry of Community Development Culture and the Arts.

Among the feature films to be screened is Moko Jumbie by Trinidadian-American director, Vashti Anderson. It tells the story of Asha who, on vacation from England to visit family in rural Trinidad, soon discovers there’s trouble in paradise. Drawn to her neighbour, a young fisherman, the strain between the two families, one Indian and one African, is palpable and as Asha’s attraction deepens, she must navigate racial taboos, family disapproval, political turmoil, and mysterious hauntings by ancestral spirits. Moko Jumbie—Anderson’s feature film debut—was a selection at the 2017 LA Film Festival.

In Quick Pick, by Tobagonian filmmaker Miguel K Lashley, young construction worker Travis Duke is out of luck with love, work and money, until a winning lotto ticket changes his fortunes. With no cash in hand yet, he borrows money from a drug lord to kickstart the celebrations and buy a car and a condo. But has Travis put the cart before the donkey?

The third feature film in the T+T line up is Clifford Seedansingh’s The Lies We Tell, a comedy about a serial adulterer and what happens when the tables are turned.