PHILLIP Williams, Mosa Telford and Sadé Barrow Browne are the three Guyanese who will now be venturing about to craft Guyana’s own film festival, following their experiences at CARIFESTA XIV.
At the recently concluded Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA) XIV held in Trinidad and Tobago, you might say that this trio was on a not-so-undercover mission to scope out the ins and outs of the industry to unleash the Region’s best film festival which features Guyanese creative talent.
Phillip, who is the President of CineGuyana, noted that he was excited to come back to Guyana and begin streamlining some of the ideas and plans he developed in Trinidad. “I would like to, with the permission of the Director of Culture, pull together a little film and animation action committee to start planning for Guyana’s first national film festival,” he disclosed.
What he envisions is that this film festival would bring together creatives in Guyana and give them a chance to show their skills in content creation, while benefiting from workshops that would function to refine these skills.
Not only that, but Mosa also posited that such a venture would encourage Guyanese to create films.
Phillip and Sadé at the T&T Film Festival
“For me as a writer, it’s because you don’t get the support, the [creative industry] is not going anywhere,” she said. Mosa highlighted that there is no shortage of talent in Guyana, but there is a dearth of tangible support for the creative sector in Guyana. This, according to her, stymies the development of the local industry. “So hopefully with us starting this, we’d be able to change the culture one day,” she said, while calling for private and public sector support. At CARIFESTA, the trio was also there to represent the Guyanese works that were selected and submitted. These were Mikayla’s Adventures, a short animation done by Jumal Sampson and Precious Barrow and Helpline, a film by Merundoi. Unfortunately, only Mikayla’s Adventures made its rounds during CARIFESTA. For this, Sade related that there was just about one showing for the sole Guyanese film and the team would have worked extra hard to get that shown in other places. She mentioned that she eventually got it to screen at the Envision Youth village, the youth segment of Carifesfa. On the other hand, Phillip explained that the Guyanese team in this field had to do some additional work on the films for the TT film festival after they were selected from the pool of films submitted after the open call. This “extra work” meant that the Guyanese films were submitted after the film festival’s deadline. Phillip, however, noted that through communication with stakeholders, the Guyanese delegation was under the impression that they would be given a slight extension to get the work done. That was not the case, however, and Guyana’s Helpline was not part of the film festival.
“[The exclusion of Helpline] really, really disappointed me. It kind of downed my spirit throughout the rest of the time here,” Mosa said.
But even with that disappointment, Mosa who is a well-known local creative made the most of the opportunity of being at CARIFESTA. She related that she visited some of the nearly 100 films that were being screened to explore the creative styles and techniques employed to come back to Guyana and develop some of her own ideas.
Phillip also noted that the group grasped the opportunity of forging a partnership with persons from the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT), which they believe will be instrumental in pulling off the film festival, perhaps by leading the training and developmental workshops.
In fact, at CARIFESTA and the Film Festival, UTT students had some of their own films screened. And Sadé affirmed that these were very well done, and showed the quality of work those Trinidadian students produced with solid institutional backing.
Since being exposed to this quality of work, Sadé said, “There’s no longer the need for me to accept mediocre work [in Guyana]. I think now we will push for higher standards.”