TFI/WorldView Partnership Launches at Trinidad & Tobago Fest

Last month TFI announced the expansion of the TFI Latin America Media Arts Fund with the inclusion of the TFI/WorldView Partnership. This past week, however, the launch was made official at the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, where we were on hand to present a workshop to attending documentary and narrative filmmakers. Now in its seventh year, the festival attracts a wide range of fiction & non-fiction projects from the Caribbean region, and screens an array of features and shorts in venues both in Port of Spain, Trinidad as well as in Tobago. The purpose of my visit was to raise awareness and exposure about TFI’s new funding initiative for regional filmmakers – but also to get an insight into these storytellers’ thematic interests and artistic visions. My experience in Trinidad was short-lived but a busy one, as TFI and CBA WorldView had the vital task of conveying a lot of information to filmmakers in a limited amount of time. Fortunately, WorldView’s Himesh Kar (Consultant) and Amy Richardson (Project Coordinator) joined me in helping to promote the Partnership together. On Friday the 28th, we offered a beat-by-beat assessment of both organizations’ application processes and the kinds of projects that we support. I began the conversation by going over select application questions from 2012 Latin Fund grantee project When the Dead Are Drier and detailing how the filmmakers successfully conveyed the structure, story and production goals of their film. To complement the written material, the atmospheric trailer for the Bolivian documentary was screened to the audience as well, in order to show the team’s visual storytelling. Himesh then added deeper context to the presentation by showing applications & clips of WorldView-supported projects. In doing so, he stressed the “mantra” that a clear and comprehensive explanation of content & form will greatly increase applicants’ chances of receiving funding support from us. The workshop presentation turned out to be a success, but TFI & WorldView’s job at the festival wasn’t done just yet. While our schedules unfortunately prevented us from watching films at the venues, we were able to maximize our presence by taking part in a radio interview and in several pitch sessions. The first one – the WorldView/Tribeca Pitch Session on Saturday morning – was led by Himesh, Amy and myself, and ten filmmakers (seven narrative and three documentary) presented their 5-minute pitches in the hopes of winning a cash prize of $900. In the afternoon, I switched gears and joined another panel for the second gathering – the RBC Focus: Filmmakers’ Immersion Pitch Session, in which five documentary projects were in the running to win over $3,000 dollars. Filmmaker Christy Garland and Leslie Fields-Cruz (from the National Black Programming Consortium) took part in this second session with me, one in which we were not allowed to give feedback on projects – but rather, could only ask the filmmakers pertinent questions about their objectives and overall vision.

In both events, I could detect that both fiction as well as non-fiction filmmakers already conveyed a clear aesthetic in their pitches, while others were able to elaborate more using visual materials in their presentations. On the whole, there were a few stand-out works-in-progress that pointed towards mature storytelling and healthy prospects for audience reach. On the documentary side, Natalie Wei’s 50 Letters (one of the three winners of the WorldView/Tribeca pitch) will profile her grandparents’ long-standing relationship via the many love letters and photographs that her grandmother has kept through the decades, while Michelle Serieux’s The Indomitable (winner of the Immersion pitch) will follow Jamaican pop singer Kane’s journey towards acceptance after he is outed as gay and shunned from conservative society. From the narrative side, Joaquin Ruano’s We Are Someone Else (another winner of the WorldView/Tribeca pitch) is a drama about a transvestite who travels to her slain lover’s hometown to return his body, only to discover who he really was – and Kareem Mortimer’s Cargo will convey the hardships of Haitian immigrants via a gritty and unfettered personal lens. For TFI and CBA WorldView, this is only the beginning of a very fruitful collaboration. Here’s to hoping that this current submission cycle brings a TFI/WorldView-supported project onto the international spotlight in the months to come.

Submissions for the TFI/WorldView Partnership are open until November 5. Jose Rodriguez is a TFI Documentary Programming Associate

[Photo: (Left-Right) Rodriguez speaking on a panel with WorldView's Himesh Kar]