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CARIBBEAN EXPORT DEVELOPMENT AGENCY - CREATE 04FILM&Animation -STATEOFFILM

THE STATE OF FILM

DR. BRUCE PADDINGTON FOUNDER OF BANYAN PRODUCTIONS & THE CARIBBEAN FEDERATION OF FILMMAKERS CONTRIBUTOR INDUSTRY INSIGHT – FILM Dr. Bruce Paddington is an award-winning filmmaker, founder of Banyan Productions and the Caribbean Federation of Filmmakers. He has directed and produced over 500 films and television programs during his acclaimed career. His most recent production, the documentary “Forward Ever: The Killing of a Revolution”, is based on the historic account of the paramilitary attack on the government of Grenada resulting in its overthrow by political revolutionary Maurice Bishop in 1979. The film is scheduled to premiere at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in September 2013. Dr. Paddington is the Founder and Director of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. Currently the co-designer and coordinator of the B.A. Film program in the Faculty of Humanities and Education, The University of the West Indies, Dr. Paddington has taught film and communications and guest lectured extensively at various universities. He has published many journal articles on Caribbean and Latin American Cinema, including interviews with the Cuban director Humberto Solas and the Mexican director Francisco Athie. He is also an accomplished photographer, teaches photography at UWI and has had three solo exhibitions.

Lights! Camera! ...Time for action! The stage has been set and the crews are in place eagerly awaiting the directors to issue the proverbial call for “action” to the Caribbean region’s film industry. Slowly growing in interest and encouragingly attracting the attention of respective governments across the region, the Caribbean’s film industry’s prospects appear to be looking up but a great deal is still left to be done. The argument is, are we aware of how much needs to be done and are we even doing what needs to be done? If ever there be a doubt about the impact of the film industry let’s consider for a brief moment the region’s key source market for tourist arrivals – The United Kingdom. Despite an ongoing recession, UK film contributes over £4.6 billion to UK GDP and supports over 117,000 jobs (up from 100,000 in 2009). Further more, films depicting the UK are responsible for generating around a 10th of overseas tourism revenues, estimating that around £2.1 billion of visitor spend a year is attributable to UK film, according to an Oxford School of Economics study. Of course some might argue that with all the established infrastructure, big studios, corporate support and sheer size of the UK market, achieving those numbers are very much incomparable to anything possible in the region. Maybe so, but there is a greater opportunity for GDP contribution and it resides in the independent film value chain among others. Most of the big budget films which are produced in the bigger markets, like the US and to some extent the UK are done through studios. In this system, a film is often developed, produced, distributed and exploited without leaving a single integrated company or consortium: a simple corporate value chain. However the independent feature film production and distribution sector provides a value system business, in that a feature film is not made and delivered to its final audience by a single company. Instead there is a chain of companies, businesses, and freelancers, all working on different elements of the production and exploitation process, and adding value in different ways along the chain. This expands the economic impact of a single production to support many smaller private entities. Therefore the domino effect of independent film production is unmistakable. Getting the elements right to support this kind of production is where the region continues to work at perfecting. Dr. Bruce Paddington, the co-designer and coordinator of the B.A. Film Programme in the Faculty of Humanities and Education and the University of the West Indies, establishes that film in the region already has a rich and vast history dating back to the 1950s in Cuba.

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