edge

More than a Trifecta of What's Best at the TT Film Fest

For today, BC on TV becomes BC on the TTFF because the 13th Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival begins with its gala opening night screening of Frances Anne Solomons Hero, on Tuesday 19 September and runs until 25 September. Here is BCs preview of the festival.Look out from Wednesday 18 onwards at www.BCPires.com and on BCs Facebook pages for his daily festival film recommendation

THE SINGLE best week of the entire calendar year for film runs from Wednesday coming to Wednesday next.There is no other time that you will be able to see films like the ones screening at the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival; not even the European Film Festival in Port of Spain comes remotely close to the TTFF for wide-ranging choice.

And you’re genuinely spoiled for choice this year, even with the festival necessarily feeling the financial loss of former title sponsor, Flow. Everyone involved with any form of visual content in the world has been either hit or knocked right over by Netflix, of course, and, in that context, the ongoing support of BP – who sponsor the Youth Jury whom I serve as mentor – is to be lauded.

As are the foreign diplomatic missions and arts bodies, like the British Council, and the festival founder, Bruce Paddington, and its prime movers, programming director, Annabelle Alcazar, and community development director, Melvina Hazard, who have set out a champagne buffet of films – or at least a Buck’s Fizz one – on a mauby budget.

Almost everything I’ve watched – and I’ve watched almost everything – is worth going to see, so much so that you almost don’t need my suggestions.Roll up at one of the several multiple-screenings of local shorts, e.g., and you will not have to sift through much before you hit pay dirt; and, more often than not, you’ll come across one or more genuine nuggets; Riyadh Rahaman’s sharp little narrative fiction two-hander, e.g., Paranoia: Crime in Trinidad & Tobago, in its eight-minute runtime, achieves half-an-hour’s worth of atmosphere and a genuine twist.

An impartial witness of the festival who’s literally watched its development over the last dozen years – like me, except I wasn’t partial to but biased in favour of the festival from its start – would be struck by the staggering increase in good, or at least half-decent, local content. (And even the bad can have great, if unintended, entertainment value: the fight scene in the cut I saw of Live Bait, e.g., has to be seen to be disbelieved and laughed at uproariously.)

Two of the best shorter films of the festival have what might be the worst names in the entire programme.The Twin Island State – it’s not even grammatically correct, since it ought to be the “Two-Island State”; what would we call the union if, say, Grenada joined T&T politically? The “Triplet Island State”?Would Barbados joining make it a quadruplet island state? Despite its name, Kirt Carmona’s short documentary covers remarkably fully the local hip hop music scene. The filmmakers spoke to just about everybody and got the focus right, giving due props, in probably the right runtime ratios, to the seminally influential local hip hop artist, Make It Hapn, and TT hip hop’s most popular performers, Chromatics and Young Rudd.

Breaking the Cycle, by repeat TTFF-winner, Miquel Galofre, who comes from Barcelona via Belmont, explodes past its hugely inappropriately dull name to deliver what Galofre does best and consistently: a powerful – both viscerally and intellectually – first person chronicle of a universal human experience. What might in someone else’s hands have been a depressing tale of domestic violence becomes a revelation of the character of the protagonist, a mother of seven children who found the courage, will and strength to leave her abusive husband and struggle to establish healthier relationships with her offspring. There is a moment, when she wishes a Happy Father’s Day, that redefines who the parent and who, the child, may be, in some situations. Galofre’s competition film, Black Hair, also extracts quite astonishing honesty from his direct-to-camera narrator/protagonist. (The emotional impact of the film is attenuated by the narrator’s unfortunate verbal tic, “like” – she unconsciously says “like” 39 times in the first six minutes alone – but perhaps most, like, people won’t even, like, notice it, like.)

Amongst the local documentary shorts, the standout is probably Raymond Ramcharitar’s Sun, Sea & Science – Trinidad after Oil. It is superbly written – as one would expect of the man I have always thought of as our second-best newspaper writer – very well shot and covers critical thematic ground: the ludicrously tiny amount of money spent in Trinidad on the kind of science-based, intellectual work that could earn the country billions of dollars as compared with the foolish – it is the apposite adjective – amount spent on non-productive, often wasteful and empty ventures, like Carnival; anyone recognising a pet-Raymond Ramcharitar-peeve does not get a prize. Perhaps Ramcharitar’s greatest achievement, though, was sneaking a genuine documentary about the great potential earning power of science-based commercial activities past a beans-versus-benefits-counting Ansa-McAl board that would have required him to delete any front pages of the Express or Newsday from the final cut. The film must have been sold to the board as a thinly-disguised advertisement for the Anthony N Sabga Awards, of which Ramcharitar is the driving force, and it undeniably is just that – but it nevertheless makes an important, timely and irrefutable argument.

The next-most impressive documentary, for me, is the 40th Anniversary of TTIT. Few may recognise instantly that “TTIT” stands for “Twelve Tribes of Israel Trinidad”, the best-established formal Rastafarian church in the West Indies, but most would benefit from watching the film, which sets out the principle pillars of Twelve Tribes faith while chronicling the movement’s history and celebrating its foundation. The beliefs of Rastafarians are no more ridiculous than the beliefs of any other religion and, in Leroy Smart’s half-hour documentary, they are given something like a credence by the articulate sincerity of the talking heads; and one imagines a talking Rasta head is more head than most, so to speak.

No documentary I’ve seen has not been done well, or at least well-enough, but there are two Caribbean ones that stand head-and-shoulders above the others, as I see them. The TTFF this year continues its knack of uncovering a truly revealing Jamaican documentary, like 2015’s Dreadlocks Story, which tied the Rastafarian hairstyle back to its Hindu roots. In Dancehall’s Asian Ambassadors, Kaneal Gayle unveils Japanese women who have embraced dancehall and Jamaica itself. Rommel Hall’s own Hall, a true crime documentary about Winston Hall, Barbados’ most famous repeat prison escapee, is flawless on its surface but its value lies deeper, specifically in its revelation of a Bajan society that, almost 200 years after Emancipation, is still largely racially organized on the basis of the sugar plantation; the unspoken undercurrent – the understatement? – of the film is that the popularity of Hall, a convicted murderer, amongst the wider – i.e., black – society may have something to do with its history as well as its present.

Adam Low’s unforgettable documentary, The Strange Luck of VS Naipaul, is also being shown to mark the death of the man Trinidadians think of as Sir Video; it is a benign illustration of the proposition that it is an ill wind that blows no one any good and local audiences are the beneficiaries. Again, the great good fortune of being able to see on the big cinema screen Satyajit Ray’s magnum opus, Pather Panchali, the first film in the Apu Trilogy, ought not to be squandered.

All the foreign language films, including the ones sponsored by the foreign missions, are strong but, visually, it may be hard to top And Suddenly the Dawn (Y Pronto el Amancer), Silvio Caiozzi’s paean to Patagonia. Similarly, the remarkable storytelling of Cocote, directed by Nelson Carlo de los Santos, which blends fiction and documentary seamlessly, is a treat; those who bear no respect for faith may opine that the film may have benefitted from cutting some of the documentary footage of syncretic African-Catholic church services in the Dominican Republic but those scenes serve the storytelling whole fundamentally importantly and it is probably better that they run a little too long than too short; even for the sceptics.

There are also two local shorts worthy of specific mention for their specific strengths: Tenille Newallo’s creation, on a budget that would probably be better described as “no shoestring”, of an otherworldly vampire atmosphere in Mangroves, is surprisingly well done; and the remarkably powerful acting in Robert MacFarlane’s perhaps too provocatively named Same Old Shit, is really worth sitting down in a cinema seat for, even if the script itself would not win either Conrad Parris or Cecilia Salazar a standing ovation.

Tickets for Tuesday’s opening night screening of Hero: Inspired by the Extraordinary Life & Times of Mr Ulric Cross cost $250 at the festival office, 99 Belmont Circular Rd (or phone 621-0709)

The selected content is not available.