Ten teams of Caribbean filmmakers from nine different countries have been selected to attend the renowned CaribbeanTales Incubator (CTI), taking place this year in Toronto, Canada, from September 8�13 at the University of Toronto. Among them are renowned Trinbagonian producer/writer/director Danielle Dieffenthaller; Trinidadian animator, visual artist and writer Omar Lewis; director/producer team Rampaul Banseelal; and Sean Mohan.
Dieffenthaller is most famous for her long-running TV series Westwood Park, who will be developing and pitching a new series, this time a crime/drama called Plain Sight. Lewis will be developing an exciting new animation for children–The Wonderful World of Myat; and, Mohan's production company (Total Chaos Productions) is now working on the second season of Life with the Ramsinghs, a soap opera set in a small fishing village in south Trinidad during the 1960s that centres around the Ramsinghs.
Dieffenthaller, Lewis and Banseelal's participation in the Incubator will be sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank through its Regional Entrepreneurial Asset Commercialization Hub (Reach).
Trinidad-born writer Maureen Hill's story concept has been picked up by Montreal-based producer Michael Mosca, owner of highly successful production/distribution company Equinoxe Film. Mosca will be attending the Incubator programme on her behalf.
He said this week: "The Incubator is a wonderful venue to help strengthen our project and pitch to industry professionals. We are thrilled that Black Mariah was amongst the projects selected. The Incubator's belief in our pirate story has motivated us even further and provides us the possibility of seeing our ambitious series come to life."
This project's participation in the Incubator is supported by Telefilm Canada.
The CTI, now in its sixth year, is a marketing and financing platform that offers selected Caribbean and diaspora filmmakers an opportunity to hone their creative and business skills in the context of an international marketplace environment. The six-week programme includes an intensive five-day workshop in Toronto, and culminates in a Caribbean Pitch Breakfast at the TIFF Bell Lightbox attended by high-profile industry delegates. The overall goal of the CTI is to increase the pool of strong, monetisable, world-class, indigenous film and television content from the Caribbean and its diaspora, in order to build the region's audio-visual capacity.
The CTI programme is an end-to-end process that supports projects from concept through production and marketing to sales of content. CTI aims to accelerate the creation of a vibrant world-class Caribbean film industry, by assisting filmmakers to generate dynamic, distinctive, and viable long-running content to be sold internationally. Both Dieffenthaller and Mosca intend to shoot their series at least partly in T&T.
The projects were selected by a panel of international industry specialists. Mentors include producer, director, playwright Nicole Brooks; producer, artist, academic Rita Shelton Deverell; director, producer, author Rodney V Smith; director, producer Floyd Kane; and Christopher Laird (co-founder of Banyan Ltd and Gayelle: The Channel).
Alongside the IDB Reach programme and Telefilm Canada, this year's CTI is supported by the French Consulate in Toronto, and the St Lucia Tourism Board.
The project is also a component of CaribbeanTales' 3D project, supported by a financial contribution from the European Union and the assistance of the ACP Group of States.