Curacao— a must-see for everyone

The seventh Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival ends today. Guardian columnist BC Pires has been writing about film since March 1988. He served on the first Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival jury in 2009 and has chosen a Film of the Day for every day of the festival. On the last day, he throws in a lagniappe.

 

Curacao (Sarah Voss & Sander Snoep/ 2012/ Netherlands/ Documentary/ Dutch and Papiamentu with English sub-titles/ 71 mins) 3 pm Little Carib Theatre, Woodbrook.

 

 

Curacao could easily win the TTFF’s Best Caribbean Film by an International Filmmaker award this year. Sarah Voss & Sander Snoep’s tautly woven film shockingly portrays life under slavery in the former Dutch possession by simply depicting life on the modern island: attitudes have not changed all that much. The modern Curacao, like the older one, is populated by a minority of privileged, often foreign, whites, whose expansive luxury is underwritten by the tight sacrifice of the larger black underclass. In some scenes—notably the cocktail party for new buyers in a real estate development and at the table in the restaurant—all the filmmakers do is set up a camera and microphone and allow the comfortably prejudiced whites to condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

 

 

But the picture of a society largely unchanged in its equation of complexion and privilege is not the bleakest thing about the film; that low point is taken by the illustration of the frightening communication gap between “Antilleans” and continental Europeans, and the even wider gap between their notions of the ideal. A bleak, entirely realistic perspective, Curacao deserves to be seen by every person in the Caribbean, if only so we know the depressingly low point from which we have to begin approaching one another. Few films deliver as many cringes-per-frame to the comfortable; the greater your privilege, the more likely you are to wonder what all the fuss is about. In Tobago, end the festival with: Botched Up (Dominic Koo/ 2012/Trinidad and Tobago/Black Comedy-Short/ 30 mins/ English) 5.30 pm MovieTowne Tobago.

 

 

Like Nadissa Haynes’ Pashan of the Froot last year, Dominic Koo’s masterful little film underlines that Trinidadians can do much more than slapstick comedy (though there are several good physical laughs in Botched Up). The setup—a hapless young Trini man resorts to kidnap to raise the money he owes gangsters—is mined for gold by the “victim” of the kidnap taking away control of his own abduction for ransom from his would-be kidnapper. Directed with a force out of all proportion to his slight frame, Koo makes Botched Up give the lie to its title: it is almost flawless and heralds a possibly significant talent well worth indulging. Botched Up is exactly what film festivals are for, a great note to end on, and easily worth a Tobago trip.

 

 

Best of the rest

The Story of Lover’s Rock 8 pm;

Within Walls 5.30 pm;

The Chiney Shop, 3 pm all at the Little Carib Theatre, Woodbrook;

Chance 3.30 pm MT POS, 8 pm MT Tobago.

Films start promptly at advertised times.

 

Here are the films that will be shown on the last day of the festival