NourbeSe Phillip @ MPENZI - Feb 16th 2007

"Word Hammers", our Literature Alive documentary on poet, novelist, playwright, lawyer & activist NourbeSe Phillip will be just one of the films screened at the Mpenzi Black Women's International Film & Video Festival on Friday February 16th 2007.

NourbeSe will also be there, reading from her extraordinary work.

Here she is, the Master Worsdsmith, in conversation with Dr. Patricia Saunders of the University of Miami, talking about how practising the Law helped her to define her craft as an artist.

Snow for "A Winter Tale"!

People, I give you: Yesterday. Proof positive the universe is benign!

You may remember that we have been waiting a full year for snow to fall so that we could put Winter back into A Winter Tale.

Over the next few days we will be busy doing just that.

Between Heaven and Earth

I'm delighted to tell you that this year, 2007, we will be producing Audio Books of Shani Mootoo's two novels:Cereus Blooms at Night and He Drown She In The Sea.

This will be our second series of CaribbeanTales Audio Books. Last years imprints, which are selling well in schools, are The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet, Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson,Gardening In The Tropics by Olive Senior, This Body by Tessa McWatt, and My Mother's Last Dance by Honor Ford Smith.

Find out more about these, or buy copies of the Audio Books from our E-store.

Shani Mootoo is at the forefront of modern Canadian Literature. As well as being my (almost) contemporary, she is also my countrywoman, (from Trinidad). I am very proud of her.

I remember feeling awe a few years back while reading her first novel "Cereus Blooms at Night". The story and characters are so richly imagined and vivid. The thought crossed my mind: "This extraordinary breadth of vision was developing in a young person, a young GIRL of roughly my age, somewhere in Trinidad, while I was growing up."

Why was I suprprised?

It came from the sense I had as a child, and particularly as a girl, of the imaginative limits that were placed on us by our environment: school, family, society. Every sort of prejudice hung heavy even in the air we breathed.

Not just that but writers like Naipaul were busy saying our environment was a literary and cultural wasteland, that nothing fertile ever grew there.

Shani's two novels face off every sort of colonial prejudice, not in an aggressive way, but simply by being larger, more imaginatively inclusive of all things human. Her stories teem with life, her characters embody complex (some might say transgressive) social, sexual, and racial realities, woven into a unique and breathtaking vision.

Naipaul was wrong, in so many ways. How often over the years have I wanted to throw back:

"There is more between heaven and earth, Vido, than was dreamt of in your philosophy!"

(Photo - Sir Vidia Naipaul: Limited imagination.)

Praise Song for de Gayelle

I was in Trinidad over New Year's and delighted to see Literature Alive playing Wednesday nights on Gayelle TV. It was a very different experience from watching it in Canada; different again from making it. That's why I don't get bored watching my programs, because each new context brings fresh insights, new perspectives on craft, form, process, audience.

To start the New Year just right, here's a clip from our award-winning documentary Blood, Dub, and the Matriarch, about dub poet d'bi.young. In it d'bi talks about growing up poor in Jamaica, and the importance of telling our own stories, even in the face of capitalism, classism, and American colonialism.


I want to appreciate Gayelle TV: one of life's miracles.

Now 3 years old, the station is really coming into its own. Location inserts and original drama have been added to a core studio-based format of call-in talk shows, interviews, and sketch comedy. Its passionately devoted viewership extends by cable to Grenada, and via the internet, around the world. Its content is 100% local programming, 24/7. Not bad for a young, independently-owned channel, run from a tiny island in America's armpit.

Gayelle, tho new as a Channel, is the product of a long gestation. Decades of dreams, analysis, commitment, blood and tears went into the development of the unique model that hit local airwaves in 2004 as Gayelle TV. So many of us passed through, as students of and participants in the process, on our way to whoever we were becoming.

I was 24 when I had the privelege of belonging to "the Gayelle family" for a brief intense moment in time. It was the year of The Hammer (Rudder), Ship Is Sinking (Gypsy) and Too Young To Soca (Machel). Hall, Laird and Paddington (impossibly flawed leaders) were directors of Banyan, the small TV production company that was producing a giddying mix of documentaries, ads, music videos, drama series, training, and their weekly flagship magazine programme called GAYELLE. The shows were developed through a rigorous collaborative process of brainstorming and improvisation. They were defined by a commitment to reflecting Trinidad and Tobago's extraordinary culture to itself, on its own terms, in its own language, using its images, characters, humor, rhythms, points of reference. Television as the voice of ordinary people, and daily life, as an instrument for social change. The medium itself was inherently democratic, and democratising. It was also in its nature creative, and healing, bringing together artists - writers, painters, comedians, singers - to pool their talents in a new electronic form as traditional and native to us as the Gayelle.

In the old days, the Gayelle was a backyard place that people came to stickfight, watch cockfights, lime, drink and exchange news and gossip in the form of kaiso. It was a vital social forum for discussion and expression. This was the concept underlying Banyan's flagship series "Gayelle".

But those were tough, lean times. The constant battle with the single local broadcaster (TTT) for airtime and funds meant no money to pay people, no ressource to create, time to finesse, space for the necessary dialogue. Always so much more to do. It was heartbreaking. In the end Banyan's programs were starved off the schedule, replaced by insipid irrelevent American content, and wall to wall American cable TV. A depressingly familiar scenario.

In the 90's the idea of a whole TV station devoted to local programming, successfully targetting a popular audience, seemed impossible, utopic.

In 2004 the digital age gave birth to Gayelle TV, as we all watched with incredulity and awe. Now it seems (almost) normal. But for me, still, a miracle. I still get choked up when I see the slogan:

AT LAST WE OWN TELEVISION.

Photos: Inside The People TV. Old Year's at midnight I jumped in my car and headed down to Gayelle. Got there just in time to bring the New Year in with friends, Robin Foster and Errol Fabian, here seen presenting the New Year show.

Tidings of Comfort & Joy

We here at CaribbeanTales & Leda Serene wish you Peace and Happiness for the Season, and for the New Year.

[Photo - L-R: Rany Ly (Technical Co-ordinator), Michael Miller (actor, A Winter Tale), and Frances-Anne, on the streets of Toronto filming A Winter Tale.]

Some quick updates:

* "Blood Dub and The Matriarch", our Literature Alive Documentary on dbi.young, won the Audience Choice Award at the San Diego Women's Film Festival.

* CaribbeanTales has been awarded funding by the Trillium foundation to present the "Winter Tale" Project as a theatre play in Toronto schools in 2007/8.

* "Word Hammers", our documentary on Nourbese Phillip, will be screened as part of the 4th Mpenzi Film Festival in Toronto, February 2007.

I leave you with a clip of Nourbese Phillip, talking about the gift of reading and books.



HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Peter Williams in tha house

This week we began shooting pickups & recording ADR for the feature film "A Winter Tale". These events brought my friend Peter Williams from Vancouver - he plays the lead.

To all the cast who participated this week: Peter Bailey, Nicole Stamp, Ryan Ishmael, p! Barrington (so sorry for "abandoning" you in Parkdale bro), and Valerie Buhagiar, as well as our tiny crew: Thank you for coming out.

For one day (Tuesday) there was snow, but it melted before we had a chance to point a camera at it. For those not in the know, our film needs SNOW to justify the title and complete a central conceit of the film, which is about a group of characters under seige in the cold (a metaphor many immigrants to Canada can identify with strongly). Thanks to Global Warming, 2006 broke all records, and there was no snow during principal photography.

But snow is promised in the coming weeks ...

In other newz: Warm thanks to all who have emailed or called in kind compliments about our series Literature Alive. They are much appreciated.

Here's one from writer Rachel Manley:

Dear Frances,
I have long thought your enterprise a most worthwhile and essential one, not just for the Caribbean in diaspora, but for the Caribbean at home...We are, after all, one. And what strengthens us anywhere strengthens us everywhere. It also strengthens Canada as you deftly collect what Martin Carter calls "our scattered skeleton" and fold us into this country's unique mix - their "mosaic."

If you missed the premiere of Rachel's film on Bravo! two weeks ago, here is a clip from it:



In The Shadow of My Fathers: Rachel Manley, was directed by Lana Lovell.

You can buy copies of all our shows from our estore

Our new Blog, and other updates.

Tired of waiting for an invitation to upgrade our account, we have migrated to this new blog. Please update your links: the address is ledaserenesnewz1.blogspot.com.

I also want to remind you that all of our official websites are now .ca (instead of .com and .org) Thus:

ledaserene.ca
caribbeantales.ca
literaturealiveonline.ca
lordhavemercy.ca

This is because a malicious vandal stole our domain names back in June, and so we had to register new ones.

To celebrate our new blog and other winter cheer, here's a clip from "Memory Places", our LiteratureAlive Documentary on author Andre Alexis. This film won a Special Acknoledgement Award at the Festival of Black International Cinema 2006 in Berlin, Paris, and St Louis. The interviewer and co-director is Eugene Paramoer. The cinematographer was Natalie Haarhof (additional photography Kiarash Sadigh). The music is by Mauri Hall.

Here Andre talks about living in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, and how and why that influences his writing.



Parkdale is also the location of our feature film "A Winter Tale".

Some of you may remember the day when the CSC (Canadian Society of Cinematographers) came on set to interview DP Kim Derko.

Here's the article they published.

Kim is one of only 5 women cinematogaphers in the CSC, she's a wonderful visual artist and the film is looking great!

"A Winter Tale" will be released in 2007.