Virtual Timehri Film Festival opens next week

Persons in attendance at the Timehri Film Festival in 2019.
Persons in attendance at the Timehri Film Festival in 2019.

For the second year in a row, Third Horizon is hosting the Timehri Film Festival virtually, bringing films produced in Guyana and the Caribbean to an audience made up of mostly locals.

The festival, which will be viewed at no cost, begins on September 23 and concludes on September 26. The event will feature films along with film programmes and promises to be a joyous and intense one. The film festival was also held virtually last year; the last physical festival was held back in 2019 at Moray House.

Following the showing of films and film programmes, audiences will have the opportunity for in-depth post-screening conversations where they will be able to engage the filmmakers and have their questions answered.

Each film will be available for viewing up to 24 hours after its listed screening time. Day one will feature ‘Guyanese Film Night’ where an eclectic mix of Guyanese filmmakers will be featured along with a block of videos presented by indigenous filmmakers in collaboration with the Darwin Initiative dubbed ‘The Darwin Initiative: Indigenous Guyanese Videos’.

Day two will see the ‘Queer Film Programme’ said to be a collection of queer Caribbean cinema. This will be followed by the Guyana premiere of Party Done, a film profiling the controversial life and work of Trinidadian TV personality, Ian Alleyne.

Day three finds the festival further delving into the lives of the queer Indo-Caribbeans living in the diaspora dubbed ‘Queer Coolie-tudes’ followed by the airing of 1979: Hmong de Javouhey, which documents the current lives of the Hmong people who migrated to French Guiana. The Hmong are an ethnic group who arrived from the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand and now make up less than 2% of French Guiana’s population. A second documentary features the lives of the market middle women in the Haitian market system in Madan Sara. The day ends with ‘Films from the French Caribbean’ which showcases a mix of short films by young French Caribbean filmmakers.

The festival will conclude with an environmentally conscious programme that highlights climate change and extractive industry challenges facing Caribbean countries, followed by the ‘Haitian Film Programme’ which features the varying migration experiences of Haitians who have moved to Guyana.

Interested persons can view all of the films and film programmes by navigating to the festival page and clicking the RSVP button which will then take the prospective viewers to Eventbrite, where they can register for the screening. Once persons have registered they will receive a registration email from Eventbrite with the Zoom link to watch the film.

Every year the festival features an artist and this year, the celebrated artist is photographer Ken Bacchus whose images of the Promenade Gardens serve as the backdrop for the Timehri Film Festival website page.

To see the full lineup of the films and screening time details, persons can check out the Film Guide and Schedule pages on the website timehrifilmfestival.com.

The Third Horizon team includes Alysia Christiani, Yaphet Jackman and singer Melissa ‘Vanilla’ Roberts.