T&T FILM SHINES AT PORTOBELLO

The annual Portobello Film Festival (PFF), staged in London, England added an important new element to its offering in 2009 with the inaugural “Caribbean Film Corner”. A Trinidad and Tobago short film called “The Power of the Vagina” achieved notable mention by being nominated in the category Best Documentary Short at the Festival.

The film by Jimmel Daniel, a final year BA Film student at UWI, attracted the attention of the Festival’s Selection Committee, not only for the quality of the film, but also for the attention grabbing title and theme “The Power of the Vagina”. Financial support provided by the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company Ltd (TTFC) made it possible for Daniel to attend the auspicious Festival, which was staged 16-17 September.

“The Power of the Vagina” was very well received by Festival audiences in the UK. In the words of Manaha Thiru a writer for the independent UK film magazine “Little White Lies”, the film asks “pertinent social and political questions that are relevant both within and outside the Caribbean”. Thiru also noted that “the film underlines how people seem happy to almost unwittingly hurl around pejorative terms connected with the vagina yet there is a certain veiled mystique about the true power the vagina exerts in real and symbolic terms in society” The films was defined as “an extremely funny and serious work relevant to men and women”.

The Caribbean Film Corner” in which the T&T film was screened was sponsored in part by the Trinidad and Tobago High Commission in London and collateral and incentive information on the local film industry was disseminated by Dionne Ligoure, Commercial Attaché at the High Commission.

This collaboration with the Portobello Film Festival was the first initiative of its kind in the UK, and provided a platform for the promotion of local films from the Caribbean. Among the fifteen (15) films screened at the 2009 Festival, an impressive nine (9) films were produced by film-makers from Trinidad and Tobago.

The Caribbean Corner also featured a “Directors and Actors” Workshop. The Workshop Panel included T&T’s award-winning film-maker Horace Ove, and T&T’s award winning actor Rudolph Walker among others. The workshop concluded with a screening of the local T&T film “The Ghost of Hing King Estate”.

After its successful screening at the Portobello Film Festival, “The Power of the Vagina” showed at the recently concluded Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, demonstrating quite clearly that Trinidad and Tobago is producing creative and talented film-makers to be reckoned with. The Trinidad and Tobago Film Company Ltd (TTFC) is committed to providing on-going support to local film-makers in taking their films to international screens and Festivals thus ensuring that T&T shares its diverse and eclectic stories with the world.