Artist Peter Doig, the main force (with fellow artist Che Lovelace) behind the Studio Film Club talks about the third Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival (starting this Wednesday) and explains why people keep making the trek to the Fernandes Industrial Centre on a Thursday night.

 

There are people who might say a T&T film festival is just an expensive indulgence of a bunch of well-off, arty-farty types?

I disagree completely. The film festival is for everyone. Film is for everyone. The popularity of general cinema in Trinidad attests to that and the festival is a way of introducing people to films that come from maybe more modest places, from people of more modest means outside of the Hollywood circus; [and] how much does it cost to see a film?

At the Studio Film Club we show films for free, have done for six years; and we have people from down the road here-Barataria, Laventille-and people from all over Port of Spain. We have a very mixed audience-but it always depends on the film. [Chuckles]

 

Still, some will characterise it as ’a white people thing’?

You just have to look at the audience who come in the door. Yes, some white people come. Some black people come. Some brown people come. It was never really for one type; and the films we screen address that.

Good film is universal. A film made in Mexico could apply plainly to Trinidad. We showed Do the Right Thing the other night and a lot of people who hadn’t seen it since its first release were asking afterwards: why aren’t films like that made here? Because the story has such a connection. It was like a beautiful play that took place on the street in 24 hours. I find it strange that there is no film here.

 

How did the Studio Film Club come into being?

Well, shortly after I arrived in Trinidad, they had the Kairi Film Festival and, just prior to that, the European Film Festival up at the De Luxe cinema-which was often full of people walking in off the street, because they were free screenings-as well as genuine film enthusiasts. I went to a number of screenings in both these festivals and began to wonder-because there was no cinema in Port of Spain that showed anything other than Hollywood or the occasional Bollywood film-where these people went to watch film at other times.

The film that inspired me to screen a film publicly was a documentary about the making of The Harder They Come at the Kairi Film Festival; they didn’t show The Harder They Come! That film was made in 1973 and I just thought, how many people [beyond] a certain generation have actually seen The Harder They Come-which is one of the great Caribbean films. That was the first film we - Che Lovelace and I-screened to an audience of maybe 30; and people were very enthusiastic so we continued to screen films on a weekly basis; I think we’re up to our 259th now.

 

The Harder They Come is not a film pitched at the Westwood Park crowd?

 The Harder They Come, the director himself, Perry Hensell, said there’s nothing more thrilling than seeing a film made about the people being shown to the people for the first time. He talks about it in the documentary [screened last Thursday: Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream], about how there were something like 4,000 people around the cinema, just clamouring to get in, just this incredible experience of people being able to see themselves, their own lives, on the screen for the first time. I would say one of the objectives-[chuckles] one of the hopes of the Studio Film Club is to show films that may inspire people to think about making films. It’s not about ’Away’ or ’Here’; it is THE art form of today, if you like.

 

And are you aspiring to making a film yourself?

No, not really. Maybe one day. Not really.

 

What happens on the Studio Film Club Thursday night?

We can count on maybe 20 to 30 regular faces and then, depending on the film, different people come out of the woodwork. People often stay after to discuss the film-casually. It was suggested that it should be a mediated or panel discussion but I thought that was too didactic. People should have the freedom to talk about the film how they liked. So people often stand around after, talking, having a drink, listening to music.

 

And this is the second time the SFC is taking part in the TTFF?

Last year, I showed three nights of films entitled Babylondon, all films made either by or about West Indians in London. The remit of the festival is kind of local or Diasporic films. The first night was devoted to Horace Ove, which was a very big night, huge crowd. He showed a selection of his own films and made a small presentation.

Then taking his film Pressure, the first black British film ever made, as a starting point, the next week was ten years on, a film called Babylon, about Jamaican sound systems in London and then the third film was right up-to-date, a film called Kidulthood-a kind of horrifying film about youth today in London, a very tough film.

There were a lot of parallels you hear about kids in schools in Port of Spain. A lot of the younger people in the audience got a lot out of it. I can tell you that because of the amount of people who wanted to borrow it afterward, to watch it again. It was a shocking film, but I think it was very real.

One of the actors said they condensed maybe a year’s worth of incidents into 24 hours to come up with this roller-coaster ride of teenaged life; and the story could easily have taken place in Port of Spain as London.

 

How many films will the SFC be screening, and when?

On the 18th September, next Thursday, we will screen Derek, a film about British filmmaker Derek Jarman who died of Aids about ten years ago; he was a very influential underground filmmaker [who] also became mainstream. Derek is made by a young British West Indian filmmaker called Isaac Julien who will introduce his film; and then on the 25th, Isaac will screen a selection of his own films.

 

He’ll be present, people can ask questions?

Exactly, yeah. We had that last year with Horace.

 

How did you come to do the poster for this year’s festival?

Last year it was a bit late to commission an artist to do a poster and I think we all felt it was a great opportunity. Hopefully this will be something that will happen every year: they’ll commission a different artist to make a poster and it will become somewhat iconographic and a nice opportunity.

I’d been making film posters on and off for the films we screen for the last six years so maybe it was a kind of obvious choice of the board to ask me. I wanted to use an image that reflected the city-and the street particularly-to go with the byline-Our Voices. Our Stories. Our Films-and, in a way, to show that what happens on the street here is as important as anywhere and that the characters we see in the city are as important as in any film. I’d made a painting [Laperouse Wall] of a man I used to see, a wanderer of the city, who always had a pink umbrella, rain or shine.

He reminded me of a character from a film and he seemed the obvious figure for this; even though he’s somewhat anonymous, his presence, to me, is filmic.

 

How do you choose films?

Usually with a great deal of discussion. Sometimes you can easily get on a roll and show, for instance [chuckles] very, very melancholic films-[chuckles] depress the audience.

I could actually show those week in, week out; but then Che often says to me, well, maybe we should show something a bit lighter, more humour; strangely enough, it’s very difficult to choose a ’funny’ film to show, particularly in this atmosphere. 

Because it’s only one day a week, we can’t really do series of films or directors, so it tends to be one-offs. Very recent DVD releases people may have read about. We show some classics-I’d like to do a classic night once a week but we don’t really have the audience for it. There’s personal taste in it, too-there’s definitely a group of us who like music and so we’ve chosen films about music-including the evening we invited jointpop to play and [singer/songwriter] Gary [Hector] chose The Filth and the Fury. There’s genuine interest in Spanish film.

[Pedro] Amoldavar seems to be a very popular director-we’ve screened three of his films, usually to full houses. We often try to screen films made on very low budgets, by any means necessary, just to try to tell people, ’If you want, you can do this, it’s not that difficult’. Now more than any other time it’s easy. We’ve shown films made with two video cameras in a motel room with three actors - Tape-Richard Linklater film.

A lot of the films are not to teach but to inspire. It’s just a feeling, really. I’m amazed at how dedicated some of our patrons are. Some have hardly missed a film.

There are a lot of people in Trinidad who read about film, have seen a lot of film. It’s incredible what was shown in the old cinemas of Port of Spain-I mean, Fellini films were shown at the Roxy-you talk to people who can remember. I don’t think it’s specialised, really. I think people in this day and age have got so used to watching film at home.

The main reason for doing this film club is for the enjoyment of watching films collectively. There’s a huge difference. I don’t have the patience to watch films on my own. I get too distracted.

 

This communion of film should lend itself to a people so ready to take to church?

Exactly! It’s difficult to compete with the Globe for atmosphere-and MovieTowne for comfort; but I like the fact that a screen in a dark room is still a magical thing.