Banyan News

 

After eleven years and three attempts to put our community television station on the air weÕve finally made it with two years to run on our licence. Gayelle:The Channel began transmission on UHF Channel 23 and Cable channel 7 on 16th February 2004.

Gayelle has now been granted a Major Territorial concession for the next ten years, permitting it to increase its free-to-air coverage to the whole of Trinidad. It will transmit now also on UHF Channel 27 from Gran Couva in TrinidadÕs central Range.

If you have broadband you can see it live (for a subscription fee in some areas) at www.gayelletv.com

Visit the developing Gayelle web site at www.gayelletv.com

 

2002 -2003

Work on a documentary on Harold Sonny Ladoo

 

In September 2002 BanyanÕs Christopher Laird travelled to Canada to begin work on a documentary on Trinidadian/Canadian novelist, Harold Ladoo. He researched and filmed interviews with LadooÕs family and colleagues. A second trip to Canada took place in March 2003 to meet with Canadian novelist Peter Such who will be in Toronto then. Such was one of LadooÕs closest friends and was instrumental in opening doors for this young Trinidadian to carve his space in the Canadian literary world – see SuchÕs essay The Short Life and Sudden Death of Harold Ladoo. Filming in Trinidad of HaroldÕs primary school teacher, school friend, sister and sister in law has been done.

What has to be done now is the most creatively challenging part, selecting extracts from the writing, scripting and shooting visualisations of those extracts and composing all these parts into the documentary.

See an article, The Uncompromising Eye, associated with the trip and published in the Trinidad & Tobago Revue.

 

 

Awards - July 2002

NDATT Vanguard Award for Banyan

The national Drama Association of Trinidad & Tobago has awarded Banyan their Vanguard Award as part of their annual Cacique Awards to the Theatre Fraternity. The award was made to Banyan in the name of its principals, Christopher Laird. Bruce Paddington and Tony Hall:

For their innovative, ground-breaking television programming, which introduced a number of directors, actors and designers to, and through, the medium of totally local film and video productions. Their brand of ingenuity has served to redefine the way we see ourselves and our region.

 

 

 

Banyan in the Guyanese rainforest with the Waiwai

 

 

 

March 2002 saw Christopher Laird of Banyan working with filmmaker and cultural activist Michel Gilkes filming a visit Michael organised to the Waiwai village of Masakeňari in Guyana with Guyanese concert pianist and music professor, Ray Luck, and piano technician Remington Ally to join the WaiwaiÕs in a concert of music and song.

 

This was part of a larger project, called The Music of El Dorado, Michael is producing examining the place of the interior and its indigenous population in Guyanese society.

 

Two years ago a self styled British explorer, and eco-tour operator, Colonel Blashford Snell seeking to satisfy the WaiwaiÕs desire for a keyboard, transported a grand piano (by air, canoe and dragging on a sled through the forest) to the village and had the whole gesture filmed by the BBC to produce a film called The Mission which portrayed the intrepid Colonel on his Ôjolly japeÕ. Since then, the piano has lain relatively unused and deteriorating in a corner of the village church.

 

Michael hoped that by the combined efforts of Guyanese piano technician to recondition the piano and teach villagers simple maintenance and the skills of Ray Luck as player and educator that the musical talent of the WaiwaiÕs would be augmented by the piano and in that way the piano would be ÔindigenisedÕ.

 

 

While Michael works on the larger project Christopher Laird worked with Michael to construct a 25 minute film around the rainforest experience, called Concert in the Rainforest the film explores with very few words, the questions of tradition and the passing on of tradition as well as documenting the tremendous chemistry resulting from Ray LuckÕs interaction with the people of Masakeňari Concert in the Rainforest has the distinction of being BanyanÕs first film in stereo. Sound engineer, Robin Foster, ensured the purest stereo recordings of Ray LuckÕs piano and the music of the Waiwai warmed by the faint breath of the gas lanterns during the concert and the magical atmosphere of the intricately thatched church.

 

The Children of Masakeňari join in the singing

 

 

Front Gallery continues

 

Boscoe Holder

James Isaiah Boodhoo

Black Stalin

Colin Laird

 

Front gallery is a programme of recording the lives and work of major Caribbean cultural figures. This project, in collaboration with Caribbean Contemporary Arts is a major archiving project which will generate material which will not only be housed in the Caribbean Motion Picture Archive but also with the artists involved, The National Library and the Interamericas Foundation in New York which is providing funding for this exercise along with the Ford Foundation. Seventeen long interviews have already been videotaped in Trinidad. Transcriptions of the interviews are in progress - an extract of one of the interviews is posted as this monthÕs archive extract. The project continues with other personalities in other parts of the Caribbean and resident in the diaspora.

 

 

Sterling Betancourt

Anthony Williams

Carlisle Chang

 

 

Gimistory

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  The Cast of Gimistory

 

Banyan documented the Gimistory storytelling festival in the Cayman Islands in November 2000 and 2001. Hosted by the National Cayman Cultural Foundation, each night for some ten nights the cast which included tellers from Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad_ Tobago, Guyana, Ireland, US and Australia as well as the Caymans perform in an open yard in a different community in the islands. Besides documenting the performances, Banyan took the opportunity to talk in depth with the trailblazers of telling in the Caribbean, Ken Corsbie, Marc Matthews and Henry Muttoo. A two hour show based on the stories in the festival is now available and a short documentary on the festival and the art of storytelling in the region is in progress. Banyan is presently also in the process of experimenting in the production of a DVD version.

 

Ken Corsbie telling his Singing in the Rain    

 

 

Banyan continues to work towards a document on the Dem Two/ All Ah We phenomenon of the 70s when Ken and Marc and others showed us all what was possible with our literature and our oral traditions.

 


 

No Pain Like This Body_

After some thirty years developing this project BanyanÕs plans to produce a feature film based on No Pain Like This Body a novel by Trinidadian/Canadian author, the late Harold Sonny Ladoo have stalled for lack of finance. Development of the project continues as we search for partners and resources to actualise this project.

 

Software: Microsoft Office

 

We keep at it and it will happen. The script is available online.

 


 

Some other projects still trying to attract distribution/funding whatever to get them out of the pilot stage and into production

 

Banyan's Uprising Series

A series of six short dramas focusing on the choices open to young people living in the Caribbean. At least one film from each of the language areas of the region directed by different directors and shot on film. The pilot film, Entry Denied, by Jamaican director, Chris Browne is now complete. Banyan will be working with the pilot film (shot on 16mm but edited on BetacamSP) and a short-list of some ten treatments for other films in the series to raise finance and interest in the production of the series.

Entry Denied tells the tale of a young Jamaican from the ghettos of Kingston who, having been awarded a soccer scholarship for Florida University has his US Visa denied.

 
 


Walk Like a Dragon

Banyan has been working with Pan Trinbago (the Steelband Association of Trinidad & Tobago) for the past three years developing the script for a full length feature drama with the history of the steelband as its background. A video pilot based on a script written by Tony Hall and directed and produced by Tony Hall and Christopher Laird is now complete along with a detailed outline screenplay and treatment. The process of raising finance and obtaining commitments from television stations and distributors continues.

Treatment 


Banyan Programme Catalogue 

Banyan Archive Summary 

 

Banyan's Home page  

This Month's Archive Extract 

 

 

 

Banyan Limited,  3 Adam Smith Square, Woodbrook,  Port of Spain,  Trinidad & Tobago,  The Caribbean  
Voice: (868) 681 0175   Fax: (868) 622 4601 E-mail: banyan@pancaribbean.com