Caryl Phillips. Photograph courtesy Georgia Popplewell/Caribbean Free Photo
The trinidad+tobago film festival/2010 programme offers a number of workshops for aspiring filmmakers, including a session on adapting literary works for the screen, led by Caryl Phillips.
The ttff provides this information:
The practice of turning a work of literature into a film is almost as old as the medium of filmmaking itself. Yet the potential for using Caribbean literature as a source for making films remains largely unexplored. In this workshop, facilitated by novelist and screenwriter Caryl Phillips, participants will get to grips with adapting a classic work of Caribbean literature for the screen. Using Jean Rhys’s short story “Let Them Call it Jazz” as his template, Phillips will take the participants through the necessary steps of adaptation before they attempt some writing of their own. Phillips will then critique the participants’ work.
Saturday 2 October, 9.00 am–4.00 pm
University of the West Indies, St Augustine
TT$300 (lunch included). Discounted price for students: TT$250
Pre-registration is required. Call (868) 621 0709 to register
About the facilitator:
Caryl Phillips is a St Kitts-born British writer. His work includes the radio play The Wasted Years (1984, BBC Giles Cooper Award), and the novels Crossing the River (1993, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Distant Shore (2003, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize). Phillips wrote the film of his own novel, The Final Passage (Peter Hall, 1996), as well as the screenplay for Playing Away (Horace Ové, 1986), and the film of V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (Ismail Merchant, 2001). He is presently professor of English at Yale University.
