Pe­ter Christo­pher

It’s time to take our sto­ries to in­ter­na­tion­al stream­ing ser­vices.

This is the mis­sion Janelle Abra­ham is about the take on af­ter mak­ing her name as a film di­rec­tor and pro­duc­er in the hip-hop, afro beats, and reg­gae cir­cuit in New York.

She said her new goal is to use her tal­ents to fur­ther show­case her home­land Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Abra­ham, the daugh­ter of late Ca­lyp­so leg­end Bri­go (Samuel Abra­ham), re­cent­ly worked with Wu-Tang leg­end Method Man, serv­ing as the co-di­rec­tor of the mu­sic video for his sin­gle Train­ing Day along­side rap­per Cortez.

How­ev­er, in an in­ter­view with the Guardian Me­dia, she said one of her fa­ther’s wish­es was for her to use her craft to fur­ther pro­mote Trinidad and To­ba­go.

She said, “He felt like I wasn’t tap­ping in­to my cul­ture, Trinidad par­tic­u­lar­ly, that much,” she said, “he said you know you’re work­ing every­where ex­cept in Trinidad.”

She bucked that trend a bit in 2019 when she di­rect­ed the video for Voice’s Year for Love.

Janelle Abraham

But now that she has found a new peak in her ca­reer, es­pe­cial­ly af­ter work­ing with the hip-hop leg­end, who she said was en­joy­ing a sec­ond prime, she felt the time was right to show­case her home­land.

“My goal is to re­al­ly tap in­to the Trinidad cul­ture. If you look at Net­flix, you see a lot of con­tent com­ing from Spain of course the Unit­ed States, Aus­tralia. You see con­tent com­ing every­where but you nev­er see con­tent from the Caribbean. And I’m from the Caribbean so I want to bring some life from the Caribbean to the net­works and I have ac­cess to do that. That’s my next step where my ca­reer is con­cerned,” she said.

Abra­ham be­came a film pro­duc­er af­ter go­ing through a rough pe­ri­od in her life which saw her tem­porar­i­ly home­less and car­ing for a young child.

She said ex­pe­ri­ence fu­elled her cre­ativ­i­ty and has lead to her work­ing on over 80 mu­sic videos and doc­u­men­taries.

She said she had gained some ma­tu­ri­ty af­ter her many years in the in­dus­try and be­lieved this per­spec­tive had brought her greater suc­cess in re­cent times.

“My ca­reer is re­al­ly do­ing good, I feel like I’m at that peak now. I fi­nal­ly feel like I’m in a good space where my ca­reer is con­cerned and I think a lot of that has to do with me do­ing some self-work and re­al­ly un­der­stand­ing the po­si­tion that I have,” she said.

Abra­ham is cur­rent­ly do­ing doc­u­men­tary work for the Roy Jones NDO Champ fight which is set for next month on May 13. But Abra­ham said she is ea­ger to do work with lo­cal acts when she vis­its Trinidad this year.