As told to BC Pires

My name is Yao Rame­sar and my fea­ture film, SistaGod, had its world pre­miere at the 2006 Toron­to In­ter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val.

Be­yond be­ing Tri­ni, I have an eye on the Caribbean spar­row. To me, that is the larg­er na­tion.

I was born in Ghana, went to Ja­maica when I was about three, left Ja­maica and went to Cana­da. Came to Tri­ni fi­nal­ly in 1970 when I was eight. My Trin­bag­on­ian fa­ther and Ja­maican moth­er were work­ing in Ghana.

Yao is a Twi name mean­ing, "born on a Thurs­day". It's like "John" in Ghana. But, back in the day, I used to crane my neck a lot, be­cause, "Yow!" was a hail.

I was in Cana­da when man land­ed on the moon and I want­ed to be an as­tro­naut. Soon af­ter I got to Tri­ni, I had an even more lu­di­crous dream of be­ing a film­mak­er. At the time, I had a bet­ter chance of go­ing to the moon. Up to to­day, it doesn't click in peo­ple's imag­i­na­tions ful­ly that you can be a film­mak­er. It's like, "When are you gonna get a re­al job?"

The way I looked at things, there al­ways seemed to be a cam­era in my head. It seemed like I was men­tal­ly film­ing every­thing I saw.

The God­fa­ther was a big thing in my life. I end­ed up mem­o­ris­ing the ad from the ra­dio build­ing up to it: There's on­ly one man who car­ries the name and he is Mar­lon Bran­do: the God­fa­ther. Then the sec­ond one came out and it was even bet­ter. Cop­po­la was smok­ing.

I tend to go for di­rec­tors like Satya­jit Ray, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, An­drei Tarkovsky.

I went to Saint Mary's Col­lege (but) from about Form Three, film be­came my main source of ed­u­ca­tion. I used to go to a lot of cin­e­ma dur­ing school hours at Saints, had my lit­tle change of clothes and thing.

In Trinidad in the Sev­en­ties, it was some­times hard to tell the dif­fer­ence be­tween in­side and out­side the cin­e­ma. In the mid­dle of the day, you'd see a man dressed up like a cow­boy. You go to a kick-up and the guys come down the cin­e­ma steps do­ing kung fu. Pulling ham­strings be­cause they're not re­al­ly mar­tial artists, just dra­mat­ic.

I haven't stopped cig­a­rettes com­plete­ly but the elec­tron­ic vapour cig­a­rette has re­al­ly tak­en over. So I'm not a smok­er, I'm a vaper.

From 1989 to 2005 or so, I made 140 short or medi­um-length films, sort of ex­per­i­men­tal doc­u­men­taries, touch­ing on Trinidad and To­ba­go life. I was work­ing at the Min­istry of In­for­ma­tion and saw an op­por­tu­ni­ty to turn the cam­eras large­ly on the peo­ple. Tri­nis re­al­ly are a bunch of in­ter­est­ing char­ac­ters. Every­body seemed to have an amaz­ing life. I con­cen­trat­ed on old­er folk be­cause I thought it was a race against time to get a frag­ment of their lives. The sad thing is, a lot of those oral his­to­ries were lost with the peo­ple who died.

The speed of the era­sure of our souls is very trou­bling. We have no sense of moor­ing. We're even de­stroy­ing our built her­itage. You're look­ing for a build­ing you knew as a child and then, fi­nal­ly, you re­alise that car park used to be it. Change is in­evitable but the rate of change and the speed of the re­ces­sion of self is very dan­ger­ous.

What makes Trinidad Car­ni­val "the Great­est Show on Earth" if it re­al­ly looks like "Rio Ju­nior?"

SistaGod was ges­tat­ing as a screen­play since 1986, the first film of a tril­o­gy. I had a dream that a black woman came to me and she was the Mes­si­ah. Af­ter what I called the Apoc­a­lyp­so, one be­ing sur­vived, and she was with child. She would re­seed hu­mankind.

In 2006, I sub­mit­ted SistaGod to Cannes and it was ac­cept­ed very quick­ly. It was some­thing they hadn't seen be­fore. Trinidad & To­ba­go im­ages was just a blow-mind to them. They saw worlds up­on worlds and all these blood­lines fly­ing through the film.

The best part of hav­ing SistaGod at TIFF was we start­ed to move in­to the tens of mil­lions in terms of ex­po­sure of my work. The bad thing was the il­le­gal down­load­ing of the film, which is now in the hun­dreds of thou­sands.

A Tri­ni is. Full stop. And oil runs through our veins.

Trinidad and To­ba­go is a place of great promise but al­so tremen­dous wild­ness. David Rud­der said this was not a fete in here, this was mad­ness, and we all know it is. And we have to ne­go­ti­ate this mad­ness. We can't hit it a dum­my and send it the wrong way. We need a mas­ter drib­bler to beat that back­line called "Death" and "Crime" now.

Read a longer ver­sion of this fea­ture at www.BCRaw.com