Ja­nine Charles-Far­ray

When loved ones die, un­fin­ished busi­ness can linger and haunt those who re­main with words left un­said. T&T film­mak­er Mariel Brown has cho­sen to find cathar­sis and pay trib­ute through au­dio-vi­su­al ex­pres­sion in her up­com­ing doc­u­men­tary.

The fea­ture-length film, Un­fin­ished Sen­tences is based on the life and work of her late fa­ther, po­et, au­thor and Caribbean lit­er­ary icon Wayne Brown.

An award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er, Brown has been known for pro­duc­ing stel­lar work in the T&T film in­dus­try. In her films on di­verse top­ics–from the in­sa­tiable sea­son of Trinidad Car­ni­val, to the soli­tary alche­my of mas­ter ar­ti­sans and even the in­ward hunger for ex­cel­lence of the late Dr Er­ic Williams–Brown is known for her sen­si­tive and vi­su­al­ly stun­ning ex­plo­rations of the lives of re­mark­able per­son­al­i­ties.

Ear­li­er this month, her pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, Sa­vant Films, of­fi­cial­ly an­nounced the Un­fin­ished Sen­tences film pro­duc­tion. This project is a jour­ney six years in the mak­ing since Wayne Brown's death in 2009, and is in­tend­ed to re­veal the life and work of one of the most re­mark­able per­son­al­i­ties of Caribbean lit­er­a­ture.

The film is be­ing co-pro­duced by Brown's daugh­ters Mariel and Saf­frey, with cast in­clud­ing ac­tor Re­nal­do Fred­er­ick as a younger Wayne Brown and So­phie Wight as his wife Megan. The two Brown sis­ters will be played by child ac­tors and first cousins, Che and Alessan­dra Jar­dine. Not­ed ac­tress Pat­ti-Anne Ali will al­so be do­ing voice work on the film, along with Nigel Scott and mu­si­cian/ac­tor Nick­o­lai Sal­cedo.

In Un­fin­ished Sen­tences, Mariel un­packs her fa­ther's life, go­ing through five decades of his pri­vate let­ters, jot­ted mus­ings, pub­lished and un­pub­lished po­ems, columns and es­says to get to the heart of who he was. In so do­ing, she hopes to re­con­nect with all she thinks she has lost.

Brown de­fies the fi­nal­i­ty of death through film and trea­sures their fa­ther-daugh­ter re­la­tion­ship through re­vis­it­ing her fa­ther's life, his writ­ings, the friends and read­ers who loved his work, and her own per­son­al jour­ney as his beloved daugh­ter.

"In the film, I deal a lot with my fa­ther's death and one of the ques­tions the film asks is, what re­mains un­said at the end of a per­son's life? My dad was a writer, so did he have un­fin­ished sen­tences? Do I have un­fin­ished sen­tences? Is our sto­ry fin­ished–my sto­ry with him, his sto­ry with me? So (the film) is more pos­ing a ques­tion."

The key mo­ment for Brown in de­cid­ing to do the film came over din­ner with friends, when she was en­cour­aged by an avid read­er of one of her fa­ther's books.

"I went to din­ner with my moth­er and dear friends of hers, Bar­bie Jar­dine and Mark Pereira. [As a young man] Mark had co­in­ci­den­tal­ly read my dad's bi­og­ra­phy of Ed­na Man­ley, Ed­na Man­ley: The Pri­vate Years... He was very en­cour­ag­ing; he just kept say­ing, 'You've got to make this film or you are go­ing to lose it.' Then this idea hit me that if I don't find a way to do this, I will lose the sto­ry some­how. It kind of scared me."

The film jour­ney of Un­fin­ished Sen­tences be­gan in 2010 and with­in a year Brown be­gan to cap­ture on cam­era in­ter­views in Ja­maica with the po­et Mervyn Mor­ris and an­oth­er of her fa­ther's dear friends, Michael Prescott.

"I just very slow­ly start­ed do­ing these in­ter­views, and then I'd write a few notes and then put it away to grieve some more and then I'd bring it out again, then put it away, and so on. I worked on the idea for many years be­fore it be­came clear to me what the film should be about. It re­al­ly co­a­lesced for me late last year, in 2014."

Oth­er in­ter­views to be fea­tured in the doc­u­men­tary in­clude Ja­maican writer and po­lit­i­cal scion Rachel Man­ley, Megan Hop­kyn-Rees, who Wayne Brown mar­ried in 1968 and di­vorced in 1981, and the cou­ple's younger daugh­ter Saf­frey Brown. In­ter­views with child­hood friends of Wayne Brown such as Ronald and Richard Har­ford will al­so form a part of the sto­ry.

"I've in­ter­viewed his first cousin Grace Montes de Oca, Nigel Scott–dad­dy and Nigel Scott were very close friends–Don­na Ben­ny al­so."

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Brown in­tends to in­ter­view writ­ers who were most in­flu­enced by her fa­ther's works in the Caribbean but is still work­ing out which of these writ­ers will be in­clud­ed in the sto­ry.

Un­fin­ished Sen­tences will fea­ture two di­rec­tors of pho­tog­ra­phy: Sean Edghill, with whom Brown has been work­ing with since 1997, and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Na­dia Hug­gins.

"There are two kinds of vi­su­al ap­proach­es to the film–one is recre­ation and re-en­act­ment and the oth­er is a very po­et­ic vi­su­al aes­thet­ic which is more evoca­tive and telling. Na­dia is do­ing the po­et­ic aes­thet­ic and Sean is do­ing the recre­ations."

The film score will be done by com­pos­er Francesco Em­manuel, who worked on Brown's In­ward Hunger (2011), and cos­tume de­sign will be han­dled by Lisa Git­tens.

Ac­cord­ing to Brown, the heart of the sto­ry is about fam­i­ly and about love, loss and art. She be­lieves the film will con­tain all things that peo­ple can re­late to, par­tic­u­lar­ly the core dy­nam­ic of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween a fa­ther and daugh­ter.

"It's a very per­son­al film. It's very in­volved in my own per­son­al life. I came to this busi­ness as a jour­nal­ist and as a jour­nal­ist it's nev­er about you–it should nev­er be about you, on­ly about the news go­ing on around you.

"I re­al­ly strug­gled with this, you know? Let the film be about Dad­dy, let the film be about Dad­dy and oth­er peo­ple–let it not be about me and Dad­dy."

The film will be set in many lo­ca­tions, in­clud­ing both T&T and Ja­maica.

"I def­i­nite­ly in­tend to shoot up in the Blue Moun­tains, al­so at Nor­man and Ed­na Man­ley's fam­i­ly cot­tage called Nomd­mi. We're prob­a­bly go­ing to shoot at Trea­sure Beach, and we have al­ready shot at Mara­cas Beach here in Trinidad and at To­co, Yara and in the Gulf of Paria.

"The sea is one of the main vi­su­al metaphors in the film so that is the vi­su­al thread that will run through it."

She hopes that the film will be in post-pro­duc­tion by Oc­to­ber/No­vem­ber this year and com­plet­ed by March 2016. Ide­al­ly she would like Un­fin­ished Sen­tences to have a life at in­ter­na­tion­al film fes­ti­vals and al­so in­tends to screen the film in T&T.

Film fi­nanc­ing, one of the most com­mon chal­lenges for cre­ative projects re­mains a chal­lenge.

"I've raised about 40 per cent of fi­nanc­ing so far and the fund-rais­ing has been go­ing well, but it is still on­go­ing."

To the au­di­ences who will see the fin­ished film, Brown shares a fi­nal wish.

"I am just hop­ing that the Trinidad au­di­ence will re­spond well to a film that is deeply per­son­al and full of love."

More in­fo:

?Vis­it un­fin­ished­sen­tences­film.com or e-mail in­fo@sa­vant­medi­atv.com.