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
