In Guadeloupe, Le Nouveaux Regards Film Festival, a cinema event to “document” Caribbean identity

The festival will offer, from Wednesday to Sunday, sixteen short films, three feature films and six Caribbean documentaries.

The Nouveaux Regards Film Festival (NFRR), which starts in Guadeloupe on Wednesday, wants “document” who are the Caribbean and help local cinema to emerge. At the origin of the NRFF, of which this is the seventh edition, a desire: to get closer to the other Caribbean islands. “Among Caribbeans, we don’t know each other well (…) We needed a more targeted festival than what was already happening in this area”, notes the founder of this festival “discovery and avant-garde”, Priscilla Delannay, wishing that the event would serve to “document” Caribbean identity.

“Caribbean genre”

The festival will therefore offer, from Wednesday to Sunday, sixteen short films, three feature films and six Caribbean documentaries. However, many professionals do not distinguish between “Caribbean genre”. “This geographic area is an incredible melting pot of communities,” underlines Guillaume Lorin, Guadeloupean director of the animated film Vanille, almost 20 times awarded. “A festival like this serves to open the oysters and let us see the pearls inside”rejoices the one who will be a member of the jury this year.

“Among the more than 3,833 films registered, we selected 25. There were years when we had no feature films at all”

Priscilla Delannay, founder of Nouveaux Regards Film Festival

to AFP

A lack of production linked to a lack of resources, financing and investors, deplore professionals. And also the difficulties of accessing writing training, while the technical aspects of cinema are better provided, in Guadeloupe in particular, where the Region has a professional sector.

“Identify”

But even for productions benefiting from the best support, there remains a major difficulty: the lack of models and representations of Caribbean populations on screens. “The first times I presented Vanille [qui suit les aventures en vacances d’une fillette en Guadeloupe d’où est originaire sa maman] there were fears about the ability of families in mainland France to project themselves into the story of a mixed-race child. remembers Guillaume Lorin.

“In our films, there are always images of someone sometimes running aimlessly, and all these years I have concluded that we are running after the image of ourselves, in search of the “identification of who we are, we West Indians”,

Tony Coco-Viloin, director

to AFP

“We consume more Netflix than Caribbean films”, he adds in reference to a ranking dated 2016, which established Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyana, as the territories where the platform offered the largest catalog after that of the United States.

“It’s true that we are used to blockbusters and less to art house cinema in original version”, agrees Jean-Marc Césaire, founder of the Ciné-Woulé association which organizes traveling screenings in Guadeloupe. “The cinematographic offering is also geographically very limited: the territory has a multiplex in Grande Terre, a cinema in Basse-Terre, recently reopened after months of closure and two cinema theaters”, he adds.

Four places therefore, none of which host NRFF screenings, due to a lack of adequate infrastructure in keeping with the spirit of the festival, points out Priscilla Delannay. “When we leave these theaters, we are on the road or in a parking lot, whereas we need spaces where professionals can talk to each other, meet and collaborate, to make even more cinema.”