Er­line An­drews

Vet­er­an film­mak­er Yao Rame­sar has be­gun work on his sixth fea­ture film in eight years. It ex­am­ines an in­di­vid­ual's strug­gle with ad­ver­si­ty, a fa­mil­iar theme for Rame­sar.

The Last Dance of the Karaoke King will star singer/ac­tor Chris Gar­cia and is about a chut­ney singer who tries to sur­vive by per­form­ing karaoke as he strug­gles to save a fad­ing ca­reer. It's sched­uled for re­lease in 2017 or 2018.

Haiti Bride, a film about a Hait­ian woman who los­es her groom in the 2010 earth­quake, is set to pre­miere next year. Rame­sar be­gan work­ing on the film in 2010 af­ter the dev­as­ta­tion.

Rame­sar re­cent­ly re­turned from South Africa, where he is shoot­ing his lat­est film, Shade. It will be the first fea­ture film shot in Africa by a T&T film­mak­er and tack­les an un­usu­al sub­ject–a young al­bi­no woman who aims to be an R&B singer.

The oth­er no­table as­pect of the film is that the crew will be made up of on­ly Rame­sar. He's screen­writer, pro­duc­er, di­rec­tor and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er. This makes it on­ly a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing than Haiti Bride, which Rame­sar worked on with just one oth­er per­son, Ed­mund At­tong. The two were al­so the on­ly crew on Rame­sar's pre­vi­ous film, Her Sec­ond Com­ing, a fol­low-up to his de­but, Sistagod.

With Her Sec­ond Com­ing, they matched the world record for the small­est crew to fin­ish a pro­fes­sion­al fea­ture film.

"It comes es­pe­cial­ly with the ul­tra-low bud­get recipe," said Rame­sar about work­ing alone or with one oth­er per­son.

"I can't even af­ford to take on vol­un­teers. It costs mon­ey to pro­vide food and trans­port, etc. Work­ing alone means that I have to ful­fil about a dozen tech­ni­cal roles–which, for­tu­nate­ly, I can.

"The phys­i­cal stress is an­oth­er mat­ter en­tire­ly," he con­tin­ued.

"Work­ing in post-earth­quake Haiti was in­cred­i­bly tough, as was the one-man crew ex­per­i­ment in South Africa. Though day-to-day in­jury is re­al, it's not as no­tice­able when you are con­sumed by the film­mak­ing.

"The morn­ing af­ter shoot­ing wraps, though, is like the day af­ter a prize fight, I imag­ine. It takes weeks and some­times months to re­cov­er," he said.

Rame­sar, who in 2006 won one of the An­tho­ny N Sab­ga Caribbean Awards for Ex­cel­lence for his con­tri­bu­tion to arts and let­ters, is al­so the head of (and a lec­tur­er in) the UWI Film Pro­gramme.

Be­sides the six fea­ture films, he's worked on more than 120 films and TV pro­duc­tions.

"Mak­ing films con­tributes sig­nif­i­cant­ly to my func­tions as co-or­di­na­tor of the UWI Film Pro­gramme," he said about the chal­lenge of be­ing a film­mak­er while run­ning the pro­gramme.

"Film­mak­ing un­der the con­di­tions that I work in forces me to be re­source­ful, in­no­v­a­tive and dis­ci­plined. It's al­ways about as­tute man­age­ment and pre­cise bud­get­ing, which is in­dis­pens­able to my work at UWI.

"Mak­ing films for me is al­so all about con­tin­u­ous learn­ing, so I be­come a bet­ter teacher."

Rame­sar met Math­ape­lo Dit­shego, the young South African star of Shade, through a world al­bi­no net­work he formed with Crys­tal Fe­lix, the lead in Her Sec­ond Com­ing.

Rame­sar said in some ways, it's ac­tu­al­ly eas­i­er to film abroad than at home.

"They have all been very de­mand­ing, but frankly much less stress­ful than the films I've made here," he said of his last three films, which were shot out­side T&T.

"Part­ly be­cause I'm re­moved from day-to-day dra­mas and com­mit­ments. But it al­so takes a vil­lage to raise a film, and I guess I get much more sup­port from the glob­al vil­lage than at home," he added.

"There re­al­ly hasn't been a home field ad­van­tage for me mak­ing films."

Many lo­cal films are in dif­fer­ent stages of pro­duc­tion this year. The Sun­day Arts Sec­tion will be look­ing at some of them over the com­ing weeks.