Get popcorn ready for the 5th Travelling Caribbean Film Showcase

Suzette Zayden

The Fifth Traveling Caribbean Film Showcase, despite not having any local entries, is currently underway in Belize City.  The annual filmmakers’ platform was launched on April sixteenth, with works from movie producers and directors from across the region available for viewing at the Bliss Center for Performing Arts.  According to Suzette Zayden, Director of Belize International Film Festival, this year’s focus is to target as many as one thousand students in the Old Capital before taking the show on the road to other parts of the country.

Suzette Zayden, Director, Belize International Film Festival

“It’s a regional project that’s looked well upon by CARICOM, that’s been supported by CARICOM.  What the initial group did [is that] there’s a bunch of filmmakers, they met in Havana and they talked about the difficulties the region was having, that we were not able to see each other’s films and the language barriers, all these problems that have made it difficult for us to share our own images.  It’s far easier for us in the Caribbean to see U.S. images because that’s what comes to us on satellite or on TV.  So what they did was they listed the support of Country Coordination Committees, there are twenty countries committed to this project and there is a coordination committee in each of them.  We’re responsible for reaching out to our colleagues in the country and asking them to send in some films to the showcase and an international committee meets and selects the films that are chosen to represent the Caribbean for this year and then once the program has been set it travels the Caribbean, hence a Traveling Caribbean Film Showcase.  It is shown, this exact same program is shown in all these twenty countries but additionally the president of the Muestra, the showcase, he takes it to the British Film Institute, to the American Film Institute, to South America, to Europe and it keeps promoting Caribbean cinema.  It’s one way Caribbean cinema is getting a foothold in global cinema.”

Among several of the shorts being shown are Guardians of the Water, Without You, With You and Bad Friday.