Who are your influences and what have you learned from them?
I’ve been lucky enough to study under some great filmmakers during my time at grad school. I’ve also had the privilege of working closely with one of the greatest film historians alive, Annette Insdorf.
The combination of praxis and theory has taught me both the elements of making a film and how the finished product can impact an audience. I find the alchemy that happens between those two stages fascinating.
I’ll also watch just about anything, but the working directors who are top of the list at the moment would be Rungano Nyoni, Carla Simón, Denis Villeneuve, and Asghar Farhadi to name a few. The masters who fundamentally changed how I see cinema as an art form range from Abbas Kiarostami to Andrei Tarkovsky to Agnes Varda to Ousmane Sembène.
Each of the directors, rather current or past, had an incredible ability to take a snapshot of a place, to fill a screen with people of a particular place or time, and make you feel as if you were right there with them. It acts as [an] archive for cultures and people who might otherwise be forgotten. I want to do that but for Barbados, for my people.
What do you think makes you unique as a filmmaker?
My voice. It has its roots in Bajan culture and is heavily influenced by my childhood growing up on the island, but it now works through a prism that has been formed through my experiences or travel and study around the world.
The result is a storytelling sensibility that is anchored in our traditions, but which seeks to use elements and ideas from other places to experiment with form and the way in which we tell our stories.
When asked to describe my work, I often call it a type of grounded magical realism. The surreal permeates my work, but it is characterized by very real circumstances and themes faced by everyday people.
As a Barbadian/Caribbean filmmaker, do you feel like you have an obligation or responsibility to represent and reflect Barbadian/Caribbean culture in your work?
Absolutely. Like I hinted at before, cinema can be used to preserve culture, a people. It is a form of archive. I think any filmmaker, but especially those from places with a smaller body of work, should harness their skill in order to help their community—in order to amplify the voices around them in an already deafening world.
Film can be a great tool to share your culture with others; breed empathy within them. And once there is a greater sense of empathy, it can help pave the way for greater understanding of one another.
I think outside of our region, Barbados and the islands, we’re fundamentally misunderstood. Because the image of us they have been exposed to [has] either been mostly through others’ eyes or been polished and manipulated to satisfy the fake veneer we project in order to stimulate capitalistic frameworks such as our dependency on tourism. We can use film to fight against this; use it as a tool to help decolonize our art and thinking.
Of all of the projects you’ve worked on, which one was the most creatively fulfilling?
I’d say up until recently, it was a play I developed and wrote called “Blood In De Roots” that was inspired by my great-great-great-great-grandparents. That was a formative experience.
But honestly, the project I’m working on right now, “Moko”, has been a labour of love these past two years. It’s my thesis and the work has not been easy and continues to be challenging, but it is the most rewarding project I have worked on for the simple fact that I have met with and am now working with so many incredible collaborators.
Filmmakers both locally and from abroad are coming together to make a little story I wrote and there’s something incredibly humbling about that. They take my ideas and turn them into tangible, real results that are far beyond my initial imaginings because their own influence turns it into something better.
I love it; the process of taking the separate threads of people and their talents and weaving it into a fully realized tapestry. It’s alchemy in the best way.
When people engage with your work, what do you want them to get out of it?
I want them to feel. I want Bajans to look at the characters in my work and see their neighbour or their aunty. I want others to see the human face of a region they might have dismissed out of hand before.
I want people to be able to be transported, if only for a moment, into a world removed from but parallel to their own. To walk in someone else’s shoes for a little while. Maybe then, we’d all understand one another a little bit better.
