?Marcia Henville has become known for her gritty reporting from the nation's crime hot spots, once even putting herself in the midst of a violent confrontation between police and residents of Picton, Laventille.Now Henville is helping to bring the true-to-life repercussions of crime to filmmaking. She's co-producing a movie–currently being shot–about drug trafficking in T&T. Sean Hodgkinson–who made the well-received short film A Story About Wendy–is the writer and director of Trafficked.
Henville was among the cast of A Story About Wendy and its sequel, which premiered recently at the Zanzibar International Film Festival.Trafficked tells the tale of three 20-something-year-old friends vacationing in the Caribbean who find themselves in trouble after being wooed into doing a favour for a local man they befriended.The film is based on real-life stories told on the popular radio programme Eye on Dependency.
Hodgkinson said Trafficked is two-thirds complete and is expected to be between 40-50 minutes long. He expects shooting to wrap up this month. The filmmakers–part of a company called Quirky Films–are going to try to get it into various international film festivals before premiering it in T&T next year, said Hodgkinson.He said funding has been one of the challenges in making the film. First Citizens Bank, the Ministry of Tourism and the National Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention Programme have so far stepped up to the plate.
"Trafficked is a cautionary tale. We've all seen Locked Up Abroad. But what happens when the story is about our own people, who look like us and sound like us?" said Hodgkinson via e-mail.
"So I hope that we can educate and inform Trinis about the dangers of narco-trafficking and I really hope that someone from Caribbean Airlines is reading this so they can put the film on one of their 12 empty channels!" he added.
Trafficked is one of many local films that are in different stages of production this year. The Sunday Arts Section will be looking at some of them over the coming weeks.