Taking up residence in Trinidad and Tobago for the past five years, after spending time in the UK making fiction films, Andreas Antonopoulos, lecturer responsible for the BA Production course at The UWI St Augustine Film Programme, has used his environment to his benefit.
Finding inspiration from the world around him, coupled with the innate need to understand the culture and explore new modes of storytelling, the films that he has created have captivated audiences since Rhythms of Trinidad in 2021, which won a Best New Media Award at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.
Andreas creates a visual experience in his films utilising lyrics, music, and history. He has crafted his documentaries on different cultural aspects of Trinidad and Tobago in a form that is not usually seen.
When he came to Trinidad and Tobago in 2018, and started at the Film Programme in 2019, Andreas had one focus, and to tell the story of the islands in a way that brings a different emphasis to them.
“When I came here, I started working because I was very enthusiastic about the history, which I had no idea about,” he says. “I wanted to break the thinking that the Caribbean is about mostly the beach and the bar, and mainly a tourist destination, which is not true. But many of people have no idea what is happening here. For these reasons, I started working.”
Andreas’s career in filmmaking began in 2004 in Greece with his film school project Mind Games, and continued in the UK, where he created works such as Nietzsche Said (2011) and Jasmine Does not Like Mangoes (2015). In Greece and the UK, his films were fictional, taking a philosophical and political stance that inspired the viewer to think critically. They encouraged a level of introspection from the viewer that one often does not see in the typical Hollywood blockbuster.
While in Trinidad, Andreas was inspired to start making documentaries, supported by The UWI. Now, comparing it to his past work in fiction, he wholeheartedly prefers the format.
“I am in the right place to do [documentary filmmaking]. It is quite unexplored,” he says.
For him, fiction films have a huge complexity, but when he works on a documentary, he has an opportunity to utilise experimental forms, and this is a more satisfying mode.
His most recent film Cheenee (2023), a collaboration with Ms Deboleena Paul, Coordinator of the Dance Unit at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts, focused on the culture of indentured East Indians and their descendants, and was told entirely through the voices of a cross section of people they interviewed; a technique that he prefers when doing documentary films. (For more on Cheenee, read the October 2021 issue of UWI TODAY https://sta.uwi.edu/uwitoday/archive/october_2021/article3.asp).
In 2023, Cheenee was nominated for Best Documentary at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Canada. It has so far been screened at film festivals in Jamaica, Bangladesh and Canada. In April, the film will be shown at the Cinema of the World Inte
rnational Film Festival in India, and later this year at festivals in Hungary and Austria.For Andreas, the typical storytelling style used for documentaries where there is usually a narrator or a script can often lead you in how to think, feel, and believe, and he does not have a need for this. He does not want to tell everything to the audience. He wants them to observe.
The documentary format is a way for him to be honest and explore what exists and do so creatively, using film as a medium.
Currently focused on the postproduction process on his upcoming feature film, Le Hand (2024), another collaborating with Ms Paul, Andreas has once again taken up this storytelling style, using lyrics to communicate the history and culture of Tobago. It will be an exploration of movement combined with the stories of the past via visual communication.
Le Hand, his fourth film, is a musical documentary. Working with historian Dr Rita Pemberton, former senior lecturer at UWI St Augustine’s Department of History, a narrative based on research was created. This was given to songwriter Gillian Moore, who made five tracks for the film. Le Hand is a conversion of history to song writing, and combination of film and dance to create something fresh and experimental.
When asked about what his next project will be, Andreas emphasised that instead of being inspired by a specific subject matter, he is motivated to make films based on the approach taken. Ms Paul will once again collaborate with him on a future short film which is already in the planning stages.
While his works have been screened extensively in numerous festivals, this is not the central focus of his filmmaking. Rather, his work has all had an aspect of academic research, something he uses with his students to inspire them to explore new ideas and encourage more abstract thought when it comes to the filmmaking process.
