Dear Filmmakers
Happy New Year! 2012 is going to be fabulous!
Good Newz:
Many good things are planned for the new year - here are just a few.
CTWD films will be profiled at Harbourfront in February! The following films have been selected to be screened as part of KUUMBA, Harbourfront's Black History Month Cultural Festival:
Features
- Joebell and America by Asha Lovelace
- Devotion by Dawn Wilkinson
- Finder of Lost Children by Ricardo Scipio
Shorts:
- Caribbean Skin, African Identity by Mandisa Pantin
- Directions by Renee Pollonais
- Entry Denied by Chris Browne
- Now Jimmy - by Mary Wells
We are very excited about this and will be promoting the screenings aggressively during January.
Even better, Harbourfront rented the films and so we have made some money for you from these screenings!
While sales have generally been sluggish, one very exciting development has been that we have been getting lots of interest from festivals and markets around the world to attend and also to screen your work.
CTWD recently returned from Ventana Sur, a wonderful market in Buenos Aires, Argentina where we were invited to screen Little Boy Blue by Nick Attin, MAS MAN by Dalton Narine, and a selection of films from the Animae Caribe Animation Festival. All the films were really well received, and stood up well against the healthily funded South American feature films and other productions.
This trip also led to many requests for screeners to many other South American Film festivals.
Over the next few weeks we will be uploading all your films to our password protected vimeo account, so that potential buyers and festival programmers can view them online without us having to send physical (and easily pirated) screeners.
Festival screenings will be a major new push for 2012, as we begin to focus in earnest on raising the profiles of individual films in our 2012 catalogue. As you know our major focus during our inaugural year has been to put CaribbeanTales and Film Brand Caribbean on the international map - and we have been very successful at this!
In 2012, CTWD will be attending a number of international festivals. So far we have been invited to attend FEMI (Guadeloupe) in Jan, the Berlinale Film Festival (Germany) in Feb, and the Guadalajara Film Festival (Mexico) in March.This will give us an opportunity to promote your work, and build key connections internationally.
We will continue to keep you posted about future markets, and festival screenings.
As most of you know I have been travelling in the Caribbean over the past weeks. It was great to have a chance to catch up with all of you Trinidad and Barbados based filmmakers - thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedules to discuss marketing strategies for your work. As you know well, this business works best when we communicate regularly and work together in tandem to promote your wonderful films.
CTWD also held distribution workshops in T&T and and Bim - both very well attended and it was great to see some of you there. This is an important forum for me to share with you the most up to date information about the distribution landscape.
As you can see, we have changed our Filmmakers Newzletter platform to posterous ... so if you recently got an invite from me from googlegroups then pls ignore.
Please note that Courtney Panchan -- who has worked with me tirelessly over the past 5 years, is now our Operations Manager. She is in charge of Sales and Administration for all aspects of the company and can be contacted directly at cp.caribbeantales@gmail.com.
Finally, we are busy preparing your six-mthly reports and those of you whose films made sales in this period will soon be receiving those by email - please feel free to contact myself or Courtney about any questions or concerns.
Here's to great success in 2012 - health wealth happiness and peace to all!
Frances-Anne
July 26, 2012
