Traveling Caribbean Film Festival stops at the Bliss
There is pretty much a shortage of films produced locally and regionally. But you will have a wide selection to view beginning this coming weekend because a repertoire of films from some twelve selected countries in this side of the hemisphere will debut and you will get a chance to see the region’s creativity and live its experiences and realities. It is the second showcase, entitled the Travelling Caribbean Film Festival organized with the collaboration of NICH and it opens this Sunday night at the Bliss Center for the Performing Arts.
Suzette Zayden, Belize Coord. Comm., Travelling Carib. Film Showcase
“There are twelve countries whose film is being presented in this showcase. Belize is one, Columbia is another, Venezuela is another, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Curacao, Suriname, Jamaica, I can’t remember the rest at this moment.”
Duane Moody
“How did this come about?”
Suzette Zayden
“About two to three years ago a group of film intellectuals from the Caribbean were trying to promote Caribbean cinema outside the Caribbean region and they realized that before we can even promote Caribbean films as a unified body, the Caribbean audiences weren’t even familiar with the Caribbean films to begin with. So there’s a dire need for us to start to figure out how Caribbean countries can start seeing what other countries in the Caribbean are making. And after seeing that we’re hoping to be able to dialogue and figure out a way to move Caribbean cinema forward. There are forty-nine films in the showcase, but these forty-nine have been divided into eleven programs. These eleven programs are all about and hour and a half except for two for ages five to eight which are half hour mainly because of the attention span for that age level, There are combination of animation shorts, medium length films as well as features.”
“We’re trying to make the Caribbean like one market. But for right now, what we’re doing for the showcase is trying to expose the films from each country to each other. Belize has one film in the showcase, it’s called Precious, produced by YES—a film about living with HIV and AIDS that was selected to be a part of the showcase.”
Duane Moody
“How were these forty-nine films selected?”
Suzette Zayden
“We look at several things when we are choosing a film. We look at the story content, but at the same time we have to balance it with technical and artistic quality because a lot of people outside the Caribbean tend to consider films from the Caribbean being low quality and that’s not true. So if your film isn’t really up to par and too much shaking and stuff it doesn’t stand a very good chance of being included in the showcase because this is the Caribbean’s opportunity to show the world that all films are just as good as the one’s you see from Hollywood and the one’s you see from outside. So you have to have some sort of technical quality and a storyline that makes sense and mostly we look for films that speak about the realities in the Caribbean.”
The films are from Trinidad, Cuba, Jamaica, Suriname, and Venezuela among other countries. The showcase ends February twenty-second.
