Lau­ra Dowrich-Phillips

In­grid Jahra is a bold woman. In 1995, when the In­ter­net meant noth­ing to most Trinida­di­ans, she and her hus­band Bri­an took the brave step of es­tab­lish­ing one of this coun­try's ear­ly new me­dia com­pa­nies ded­i­cat­ed to build­ing Web sites. They knew noth­ing about new me­dia at the time; she had a de­gree in tourism man­age­ment, but they taught them­selves along the way, de­vel­op­ing some of this coun­try's first cor­po­rate Web sites for TSTT and the Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny, among oth­ers. Their com­pa­ny, Caribbean In­ter­ac­tive Mul­ti­me­dia Lim­it­ed, de­vel­oped the Caribbean's first mul­ti­me­dia in­ter­ac­tive CD-ROMs in 1997. The CD, the Mul­ti­me­dia En­cy­clo­pe­dia of An­cient Egypt was pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with ABC TV New York and the soft­ware in­te­grat­ed in­to the ed­u­ca­tion­al cur­ricu­lum of var­i­ous US cities. The Jahras sold their com­pa­ny to Neal and Massy ITC Group and she went on to work for Ansa McAl, suc­cess­ful­ly launch­ing the com­pa­ny's Web site and de­vel­op­ing web poli­cies. Now, Jahra, who re­cent­ly com­plet­ed her MBA, is set to make an­oth­er en­try in­to this coun­try's his­to­ry books. Founder of Gi­ant Screen En­ter­tain­ment, she is the woman be­hind IMAX the­atre's en­try in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go.

A moth­er of three, Jahra and her fam­i­ly have of­ten at­tend­ed IMAX the­atres abroad and were al­ways amazed, she says, by the qual­i­ty of the ex­pe­ri­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly the 3D tech­nol­o­gy. "I liked the brand and I al­ways want­ed to be in me­dia so my hus­band and I, to­geth­er with our busi­ness part­ner Ger­ry Hadeed, ap­proached IMAX about com­ing to Trinidad," she said. "We saw the gen­e­sis of where they were go­ing from film to dig­i­tal. In 2006, they start­ed to digi­tise some films and they wooed film di­rec­tors. We saw this trend and then the 3D tech­nol­o­gy. We were watch­ing the com­pa­ny and de­cid­ed to try to see if we could get it. In 2008, we wrote a let­ter and the syn­er­gies were right. I think things hap­pen for a rea­son."

Get­ting this large world­wide brand to Trinidad wasn't easy. It is a cost­ly ven­ture, hov­er­ing some­where around the $20 mil­lion mark to com­plete the project. Jahra faced many closed doors, de­spite proof that this was a worth­while ven­ture and the ev­i­dence lay in the packed cin­e­mas across the coun­try each week­end. AIC Lim­it­ed even­tu­al­ly stepped in to fund the project but spon­sor­ship was vi­tal to de­fray the costs of at­ten­dance. "It wasn't ab­solute­ly easy to get spon­sor­ship. There were those who said thanks but no thanks. It was a eas­i­er sell when peo­ple were fa­mil­iar with the brand."

Gi­ant Screen teamed up with Jim Pat­ter­son, the project di­rec­tor and con­sul­tant on the IMAX Trinidad project, to as­sist. Jahra met Pat­ter­son at a con­fer­ence held by the Gi­ant Screen En­ter­tain­ment As­so­ci­a­tion and was im­pressed with his ex­pe­ri­ence. Pat­ter­son has over 20 years in the fam­i­ly en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­try, launch­ing and man­ag­ing a va­ri­ety of projects in eight coun­tries. A Cana­di­an, he worked as the vice pres­i­dent of sales for South East Asia for IMAX and worked with sev­er­al cus­tomers to open and run 15 IMAX the­atres. The team was able to se­cure five non-com­pet­ing spon­sors: Dig­i­cel, Carib, Ansa Au­to­mo­tive, At­lantic LNG and FCB. Dig­i­cel is the ti­tle spon­sor and as such the lo­cal brand will be called Dig­i­cel IMAX. "Our the­atre al­leged­ly has the most spon­sor­ship net­work," Jahra re­vealed proud­ly. Asked if she be­lieves T&T could sus­tain an­oth­er cin­e­ma, Jahra said she re­searched the mar­ket deeply to see if the mod­el could be sus­tained here and be­lieves in­stead of com­pet­ing, IMAX would add to the movie-go­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. "I think I can grow the mar­ket, we can co-ex­ist," she said, not­ing that she wants to see how the mar­ket sup­ports it be­fore con­sid­er­ing branch­es in San Fer­nan­do and Ch­agua­nas.

She al­so be­lieves the IMAX ex­pe­ri­ence is worth the $75 tick­et fee. The the­atre, to be lo­cat­ed at One Wood­brook Place, will seat 360 peo­ple and each seat would be as­signed up­on tick­et pur­chase so lin­ing up for a good seat will be elim­i­nat­ed. Jahra, who has been in­volved in every de­tail, down to the type of seats cho­sen to out­fit the space, said the geom­e­try of the cin­e­ma would make every seat a good seat.

De­spite the tech­no­log­i­cal won­ders of the brand, Jahra is par­tic­u­lar­ly pleased with the op­por­tu­ni­ties it of­fers for learn­ing. The cin­e­ma will be open on morn­ings to ac­com­mo­date field trips for school chil­dren to see ed­u­ca­tion­al films such as Born to be Wild 3D, Hub­ble 3D and Un­der the Sea 3D. "It is a com­mer­cial ven­ture but I like that we will do some­thing mean­ing­ful, that our chil­dren can be ex­posed to learn­ing."