September 2015


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“Our greatest achievement has been the output of students who have brought an immensely diverse suite of narratives to the storytelling table, through their productions”, says Yao Ramesar, lecturer in and coordinator of The UWI Film Programme and a singularly diversified and distinguished filmic storyteller, with a note of well-deserved pride.

Notable feature film releases that have come from students of the programme include Santana: The Movie (Roger Alexis) and Escape From Babylon (Nicholas Attin). Programme alumni have gone on to professional work in all genres of cinema – sci-fi, animation, horror, urban, slice of life, documentary and the world of video gaming – just to name a few of the post-programme arenas. Graduates of the programme “constitute a highly mobile workforce”, remarks Ramesar.

There are two possible tracks in the film programme. There is the major (B.A) in Film Production – an interdisciplinary programme designed to teach potential filmmakers the technical skills and of production at the highest level, and ensure that these filmmakers understand and apply the theoretical and aesthetic principles of film. It is designed to ensure the balance between theory and practice is maintained and that analytical and critical skills for the practice of craft are also learnt.

The other track is a major (B.A) in Film Studies, designed to teach students how to evaluate, critique and analyse film products and understand how film images work. Future critics and aestheticians of film will therefore be grounded in the basic technical skills of filmmaking. Among numerous courses offered are Caribbean Cinema I & II, Cinemas of Africa, Latin American Cinema and Indian Cinema.

With numbers growing, and the requirement of studio and editing spaces proportionally with this growth, the country's first film degree programme now has its own building – a testament to the flow and growth of the development path since its inception in 2006. The precursor was the first tertiary level film courses offered in Trinidad and Tobago, designed and deployed by Ramesar and Kenwyn Crichlow at the then Creative Arts Centre(now Department of Creative and Festival Arts/DCFA) UWI, as a component of the B.A in Visual Arts degree in 1998. The programme is located in the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Education.

Ramesar notes that cinema here ‘has a renaissance capacity’. “Students”, he explains, “have the potential to and have demonstrated their power to advance the narrative structure of filmic storytelling, as the Hollywood formulaic way has been trapped in a closed romantic realist structure for much of its existence.”

That ‘renaissance capacity’ it appears, is a key success factor of The UWI Film Programme. Students begin the work of challenging the form and structure of storytelling in film and, as graduates of the programme, continue to push the proverbial envelope in the spaces where they pursue their original productions – with a high degree of competence, if audience feedback is the gauge. The programme's students routinely cop multiple awards at The Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, usually their first port of call upon completion of their films.

This 'renaissance capacity' is also the context for the programme’s 10th anniversary showcase event – the first staging of the World Festival of Emerging Cinema. The inaugural festival takes place this November around the theme, Women in Cinema, and will bring together the best works of the students and their international peers while facilitating opportunities for global collaborations and co-productions. It recognizes that filmmakers throughout the Caribbean region need to be provided with the expertise and portable skill sets to ensure their competitiveness in the burgeoning international film industry and this is the direction in which they are moving.

From next month until the World Festival of Emerging Cinema, UWI Today is pleased to make space to feature the writings of some of the programme’s students on the Film Studies track as they reflect on topics from Caribbean Cinema, filmmaking in the region, critiques of form and content and the theme of the Festival, Women in Cinema.