Paula Lindo – Our histories, stories, present, future.

Director and actor Paul Pryce’s short film The Deliverer, which had its T&T premiere at the 2018 T&T Film Festival, continues to do well worldwide. Pryce said he’s excited about shooting the feature-length film of the same name in T&T in 2019.

Following the TTFF, Pryce took the film to the Montreal International Black Film Festival for its Quebec premiere, of The Deliverer, where it was well received, especially since it had its Canadian premiere a few weeks earlier in Toronto at Caribbean Tales International Film Festival. Subsequently, the film was screened at Los Angeles at the ARPA International Film Festival and the Bahamas International Film Festival. The film will be screened again in Toronto for the Toronto Black Film Festival in 2019. It was a Sundance screenwriters lab finalist in 2017, a quarter-finalist at Page International Competition, second round at Austin film festival, “so this very local script has been getting a lot of recognition on international markets so that’s a very good sign of the marketability and viability of the project and we still have work to do on it,” Pryce said.
The film initially started out as a biopic on Dole Chadee, and evolved into a story about a community leader holding out a corrupt government through a combination of stories. Pryce said “I was investigating this infamous character in Trinidad’s history who was executed with his men in the 1990’s for the murder of the Baboolal family. The case captivated the nation and there was a lot of talk about how quickly he was executed. I’d done extensive research on the case and a story started to emerge about Chadee and a driver who was close to. Years later I started researching the Highway Reroute Movement and Dr. Kublalsingh’s hunger strike against the Government. Those events started to inform the script and what started to emerge was this very humble and righteous leader of a community holding out against a corrupted government threatening to destroy his fishing village home, and him encountering a Dole Chadee-like character and feeling the need to broker a deal with this drug runner to fight the government to get them off their land.”
Pryce said the film serves as a vehicle to explore aspects of crime in T&T. “It looks at what happens when there is a vacuum in a community and those in power are not there to really protect and serve those communities, how the criminal elements can fall into those spaces and take over. The film seeks to explore how crime really takes hold in these communities and how political exploitation, political abuse, breakdown in political power and law enforcement gives rise to this sort of thing happening. These are things we already see happening on our southern borders.”
Pryce, who is the lead actor, co-directed the film with Ron Morales, who he had worked with previously. He said the local film and arts communities were very supportive and generous. “The cast and crew, Evelyn Caesar-Munroe, Marvin Ishmael, Leslie-Ann Lavine, Michael Cherrie, Maya Cozier, Tonya Evans, they all came on board to work on this to really make it happen.”
The film was shot in T&T in 2016 as a proof-of-concept for the feature-length film to show to investors and audiences so they could see if it would be viable in the market. “It’s essentially a contraction of the first act of the film. We shot it over four days in Grande Riviere with a very small crew, cut it in New York and did the post-production there. For the film next year we have some sponsorship for equipment from a major camera brand and a post production house is also coming on board. Through Lisa Wickham we’re going to be calling in on relationships and my relationships abroad and we’re going to cast some folks that have some International names so that the film could travel internationally. We also have a television series that is inspired by the film that we’re also in development with, called the Serpent’s Mouth which is the body of water between Icacos and Venezuela.”
Pryce said he’s sure audiences worldwide will be able to relate to the film. “What is beautiful about this story is that it’s not just our problem. It’s a geopolitical issue, because it’s dealing with oil and what that vacuum of oil and the politics of that and drugs and who is the ultimate consumer of that. We’re just a transshipment point, so we’re a pawn in this global network so it’s not just our issue, it’s a global issue of which we are one of many cogs in a wheel and if we are able to tell the story from our lens, I think it says a lot to the world.”
For more information on the film, find The Deliverer Movie on Facebook, go to http://www.thedeliverermovie.com and email thedeliverermovie@gmail.com.