DIRECTOR YAO RAMESAR

Ghana-born, Caribbean filmmaker Yao Ramesar was honoured as the Caribbean’s first Laureate in Arts and Letters, at the inaugural Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence (ANSCAFE) in 2006. The awards recognised that… “Ramesar’s most significant contribution is that he has taken Caribbean cinema to the world under the rubric [ …] Caribbeing®”.

Ramesar began filming his most recent feature film “Fortune For All” in late 2019, bringing production to a close in mid-March 2020 when Trinidad and Tobago went into Covid lockdown. Editing work on the film continued remotely until in-person meetings could resume. The result is a quietly intense narrative reflecting our lived experience of that strange time. The film has garnered selection in two festivals this summer: Ischia Global Film Festival (Italy) and Cacique Film Awards (Egypt); Information regarding other festivals is embargoed at this time.

In December 2015 he participated in The Ghetto Biennale, Port au Prince, Haiti as the sole filmmaker, with the Haitian premiere of his feature film HAITI BRIDE both at the Biennale as well as in Jacmel where much of the feature was lensed.

In July – August 2015 he began production in India of his feature “The Last Dance of the Karaoke King” (Mumbai, Delhi, Agra and Goa). While in Delhi he gave the commencement address at the Asian Academy of Media Studies Film School.

Also in 2015 “Haiti Bride” became the first African diaspora (and Caribbean) feature film to screen in the main competition at Africa’s largest and oldest film festival, FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where it was up for the Golden Stallion award.

Ramesar’s Sistagod remains the sole Trinidad and Tobago feature film to gain official selection at a major international festival world-premiering in 2006 at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the major North American and hemispheric festival. It has continued garnering awards, copping the Grand Prix for Best Feature (2014), at ArtoDocs International Film Festival in St Petersburg Russia.

The Routledge Companion To World Cinema, 2017, (117-118) discusses Ramesar’s Caribbeing aesthetic applied to his feature films Sistagod, Her Second Coming and Haiti Bride, in the context of visionary cinema currents. The year 2006 also saw the completion of a PhD thesis on his work entitled “Being, Consciousness and Time: Phenomenology and the Videos of Robert Yao Ramesar” (G. Hezekiah/University of Toronto). This was published in 2009 as Phenomenology’s Material Presence (Intellect Books/UK & Chicago University Press/US): one reviewer making the point that “the beautiful and innovative video work of Robert Yao Ramesar can carry out philosophy.” 

In 2007 he served as the first filmmaker in residence at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine where he has pioneered the teaching of cinema at the tertiary level in Trinidad and Tobago, fostering a generation of emerging filmmakers who have produced over 140 diverse films on Trinidad and Tobago that have been screened locally, regionally and internationally. Ramesar remains a cornerstone of the emerging local and regional film culture, having taken Caribbean cinema to the world under the rubric of an original aesthetic “Caribbeing”, notable for its almost exclusive reliance on sunlight to illuminate the people and landscapes of his films.

One of the Caribbean’s most accomplished and prolific directors, he has created over 120 films on the people, history and culture of Trinidad and Tobago, screening in more than 100 countries throughout Africa, Asia, North, South and Central America, Eastern and Western Europe and throughout the Caribbean, including multi-channel cable simulcasts (California) 1992/93, WHMM-32 (Washington) 1990, European Media Arts Festival (Germany)1992, Reel Caribe (Toronto) 1996, MIDEM (Cannes) 1996, Smithsonian Institution (Washington) 1992, Oakland Museum of California 1992, Athens International Film Festival 1992, Darryl Reich Rubenstein Gallery (Virginia) 1987, Washington DC Artworks 1988, Carifesta V, VI, VII, VIII & IX  (1994,1995, 2000, 2003 & 2006), the “Sing Me a Rainbow” Meridian International Center’s US-wide touring exhibition, 1998, the Noir Tout Couleurs Festival of Cinema (Guadeloupe) 1998 & 1999. He was the featured filmmaker at Carifesta VII in St. Kitts/Nevis (2000), filmed Trinidad and Tobago’s cultural participation at Carifesta VIII in Suriname (2003) and chaired the Carifesta Film committee in Trinidad and Tobago (2006).

Honours for his work include the Paul Robeson Awards (U.S.) for Best Film & Best Editing (1990) and Best Cinematography (1991); the Critics’ Choice Award at the Global Africa Film Festival (U.S) 1992; the Royal Bank/MATT awards for Best Television Series 1996; Best Editing, Best Supporting Video and Best Television Series 1997; Best Supporting Video 1998 (Trinidad); the Saraswatti Devi Award 2000; and Decibel Award 2002; Most Popular Feature Film, Flashpoint Film Festival (Jamaica) 2006; Caribbean Cinema Award, Studio 66 Arts Support Community (Trinidad) 2006; Best Caribbean Film and Best Director, Bridgetown Film Festival (Barbados) 2007.

In 2000, the Jornada Film Festival in Bahia, Brazil, the BRNO16 Film Festival in the Czech Republic and the Tabernacle Trust Exhibition of Films on Trinidad Carnival (London) also featured Ramesar’s work. That year, the Cavehill Film Society, Barbados, also screened a retrospective of Ramesar’s works.  In 2001, his work was screened at Fespaco’s International Festival of African Cinema in Burkina Faso, and in 2001 and 2003 at Cinefest Nuestra America in Wisconsin. His films were also included in the IDB’s First Latin and Caribbean Video Art Exhibition, which toured cities throughout the Americas, as well as Washington DC and Rome.

Ramesar participated in the Big River International Artists’ Workshop and Exhibition in 2001; the following year, he directed the filming of the acclaimed musical “Carnival Messiah” in the UK. His work was featured in the first National Sculpture Exhibition, and at the first Kairi film Festival, in Trinidad in 2003.

In 2002-3, Ramesar took part in the inaugural and second editions of the Festival of African and Caribbean Film (Barbados), where he delivered a public lecture and screened films; Caribbean INPUT screening in Jamaica; the Zanzibar International Film Festival (Republic of Tanzania); Cine Latino Film Festival (San Francisco); Sin Fronteras, University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he conducted a week-long workshop on Caribbean film; Swimming Against the Tides, Caribbean Culture in the Age of Globalization, Bowdin College, Maine USA, where he lectured and screened films.  His work was also featured at the VideoBrasil Festival, Sao Paolo, in 2003.

Ramesar’s credits in series television include the “She Woman” series produced for the U.N. Beijing Conference 1996, and simulcast live to the Caribbean region, and the award-winning “People” and “Routes” series. Collaborating with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Ramesar directed “The Saddhu of Couva” and “The Coral”, the first screen adaptations of Walcott’s poetry. He has also produced seminal documentaries on the pioneers of the steelband movement, traditional carnival characters, indentureship, emancipation, religious rituals and the myriad festivals and celebrations of Trinidad and Tobago.

In 2004, he was a delegate at the Art Council of England’s “A Free State” conference, at the British Museum (UK), where he screened selected work. He was also a featured artist at the Lighting the Shadow exhibition at CCA7. His work was screened at the Museum Ludwig (Cologne) 2005; The Horniman Museum (London) 2006; Jakmel Film Festival (Haiti) 2006; Flashpoint Film Festival (Jamaica) 2006 and the Pan African Film Festival (Los Angeles) 2007; Bridgetown Film Festival (Barbados) 2007; Black Harvest Film Festival (Chicago) 2007; The British Museum (London) 2007; Caribbean Tales (Toronto) 2007; GRULAC (Johannesburg) 2007; Kerala International Film Festival (India) 2008; Kampala Film Festival (Uganda) 2008; DC-Caribbean Film Festival (US) 2008 and The Caribbean Film Festival (New York) 2008.  In 2013 he presented at the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Grenada.

This year he presented a warmly received paper reviewing the implementation of his Caribbeing aesthetic in the making of the feature film Haiti Bride  at the Contemporary Caribbean visual culture: artistic visions of global citizenship (June 2014) conference.

Ramesar’s theories on Caribbean filmmaking have been featured in numerous publications including his paper “Caribbeing: Cultural Imperatives and the Technology of Motion Picture Production” in Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 42, No 4., and “Caribbean Culture and in the Digital Domain”, presented at Carifesta Symposia in St. Kitts/Nevis 2000. His work is the subject of “Filmed Portraits: an Examination of Themes and the Pictorial Techniques of Yao Ramesar, from his short film series ‘People’”, an 87-page work by Pamela Hosein, U.W.I, 1998 and a subsequent Mphil thesis by the same author completed in 2008. His work is also examined in PhD theses, including one by Marina Maxwell (UWI). 2008 saw the completion of a documentary feature on his work entitled “Films of Yao Ramesar” which premiered at the DC-Caribbean Film Festival in the U.S.

Ramesar holds a B.A (Summa cum Laude) in Film Production and M.F.A in Film Directing from Howard University (Washington D.C) and a PhD in Cultural Studies (Film) from the University of the West Indies. On completion of his studies at Howard University he immediately returned to Trinidad and Tobago to begin his mission of teaching and developing indigenous cinema in his homeland. He is a lecturer in film and Coordinator of the UWI Film Degree Programme at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad.

Ramesar is also concurrently working on a director’s cut of Her Second Coming, anticipated as... “doing for Caribbean cinema what Wilson Harris or Gabriel Garcia Marquez did for New World Literature”. Her Second Coming introduces Crystal Felix in her screen debut in a film photographed completely in falling sunlight, expanding Ramesar’s Caribbeing aesthetic. Felix is a person living with albinism whose condition makes her very sensitive to sunlight. Life imitates art as a theme of environmentalism pervades the film as does the Caribbean landscape, itself a central character.

His work was also the subject of the documentary feature The Films of Yao Ramesar that premiered in the US in 2008. 

Ramesar’s quarter century in film, which he celebrated in 2009, has been marked by records, awards and accolades which have reflected not just his artistic output, but also his practical approach to the medium. (On Her Second Coming, he and director of photography/editor Edmund Attong have equalled the record set by Alexander Abela’s Makibetho for the smallest crew to make a professional feature, and Ramesar himself surpassed Polish director Andrzej Kondratiuk’s record for most credits on a single film.)

In 2009 Ramesar also co-founded the Caribbean Travelling Film School, which aims to incubate filmmaking talent throughout the region. This is, in part, a continuum of a blueprint he developed in the 1980s for the consolidation of a regional cinema, which would involve filmmakers travelling in Caribbean communities and fostering a citizens’ cinema, which he termed “The Moving Image”.

Ramesar and his work have been covered in reviews, interviews etc. including in the New York Times, AOL Time-Warner, the Toronto Star, the Washington Post, BBC, Timeout and numerous other broadcasts and publications.

In 2011 Ramesar began direction of his fourth feature film in Haiti entitled “Haiti Bride”. In 2013 he was recognized by the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival as a Pioneer in Film and most recently in 2014 The Ministry of Legal Affairs recognized for his contribution in the Industry for his “effective use of the Intellectual Property System”.

Ramesar continues his work as a filmmaker and is the Coordinator of the Film Programme at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus in Trinidad. He has been a director of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company since 2011.