The movie Chasing Refuge is only 15 minutes long but it packs in a lot of effort, money, commitment and pain from one local filmmaker.
Krystian Ramlogan has dreamed of making films since his early teens, but it took him nearly two decades, one of which he spent making videos in the communications department of a local bank, before he actively pursued the dream.
He did his SATs and earned a scholarship to study for a bachelor's degree in radio, television and film at Howard University in Washington DC. He then did the Howard master's in film.
He had to do a short film for his thesis and, after considering various story ideas, came up with one based on a haunting personal experience: The suicide of his half-brother, Dion, when Ramlogan was a teenager. Ramlogan regrets never really getting to know Dion, his father's son.
"Dion is a part of my life that affects me even to today," he said. "In my own way I felt guilty when he committed suicide. I know why he did what he did, but I didn't understand it. I turned the situation around in my head so many times."
Chasing Refuge took Ramlogan two and a half years to make. He started in August 2011 and finished it in February. He spent a few months working on the script, then another couple of months recruiting actors through the classified ads site Craigslist.
Ramlogan also hired a composer to create original music for the film. He used his own money and money from family and friends. Shooting had to stop temporarily partway through for him to raise more funds. The film is 15 minutes long because he couldn't afford to make it any longer.
The effort and money are paying off. The film is getting some attention. It won best original screenplay at DC's World Music and Independent Film Festival in August and will be screened at the district's Reel Independent Film Extravaganza and Georgia's Urban Mediamakers Film Festival in October.
Ramlogan missed the deadline to submit it to the T&T Film Festival but says he plans to do so next year.
Chasing Refuge is a sad, introspective film, with good acting performances and sharp cinematography. It's a fine piece of storytelling about a man who blames himself for his brother's suicide.
Although Chasing Refuge is very different from Ramlogan's experience–the brothers are two grown men for one thing, and Dion is the mother's child for another–he said making the film helped him deal with a loss he will always feel and which he'd previously tried to express through poetry. The poem is used at the end of the film.
"It was a very difficult process writing the story, because the first thing I did was sift through my memories of Dion," Ramlogan said. The only photo he has of Dion is on the film's Web site.
"I studied that picture a lot when I was writing the story," he said. "The thing I will never get over is that sense of loss. There's just no way to explain it away."
Ramlogan–who's currently working in the IT department of the Ministry of Sport–is looking for other opportunities to make films, whether through his initiative or others.
"Although my main focus is directing, I'm willing to work in whatever capacity to help any filmmaker who's interested in creating an original film in Trinidad," he said. Ramlogan was a production assistant on Girlfriends' Getaway, the US movie that was shot entirely in T&T earlier this year with a mainly local cast and crew. It's now showing in local theatres.
Working on the film was a "mostly positive" experience, he said.
"I learnt that it is much more difficult to make a film here than in the US," he said. "Mainly because in the US you have access to more highly trained crew. It's a little easier to move around. Traffic [in Trinidad] was really bad sometimes. The weather was little bit unpredictable. It did slow us down on a few occasions.
"But the main takeaway for me from Girlfriends' Getaway is that there are people in Trinidad like me who are passionate about this thing we call movies," he said. "This thing that gets into your blood and it's all you want to do–you want to make movies. And that was like the best thing about the experience for me–finding people like myself."