Frances-Anne Solomon - Contributed

Aiming to make a statement to youths about their multi-cultural Caribbean heritage, the Caribbean Tales Youth Film Festival held in Toronto strives to make an impression every year on university and high school students.

Using film as a teaching mechanism about identity and other cultural issues, director Frances-Anne Solomon founded the Caribbean Tales Youth Film Festival earlier this year. Solomon is an accomplished filmmaker, writer and producer in film, TV, radio, theatre and new media. She was born in England to Trinidadian parents.

PRODUCERS

The festival is produced by Caribbean Tales, The Caribbean Studies Program and New College at the University of Toronto, The Ontario Multi-Cultural History Society and gets financial support from the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Gateway Fund.

Solomon told The Sunday Gleaner the festival was launched in February, screening classic and contemporary Afrocentric films. The festival presents a unique selection of films and documentaries from and about the African diaspora, representing a broad range of experiences that celebrate and educate on the richness and diversity of African diasporic heritage worldwide.

"For the next festival in 2010, we're focusing on Afro-Caribbean filmmakers. We're showing the films and bringing the schools to see them," said Solomon. "We're also having talk-back sessions because we're giving young people the learning tools and guides that they will need in the future. This will be our second time hosting the Youth Film Festival and we want to show Caribbean films from Canada."

one-of-a-kind event

The festival takes place in Toronto from February 2-25.

Seeing the festival as a one-of-a-kind event, Solomon believes there are many benefits for youths from watching the films she has personally chosen.

"I think it's important for young people to have a strong sense of self and films like the iconic, The Harder They Come can give youths a sense of direction," she said. It is no mistake then that the festival takes place every February during the celebrations of Black History Month and a wide selection of films are chosen from the Caribbean's best.

Among next year's 20 films to be shown are Invisible City by Herbert Davis, Guns by Jamaican Sam Sutherland, A Linc In Time, The Tenant, A Winter's Tale, Where Do White People Go When The Long Weekend Comes, The Wondrous Journey of Delroy Kincaid By Powys Dewhurst, Da Kink In My Hair, Miss Lou Den and Now, among countless others.

Solomon explained, "I choose those (films) because every film had something different to offer about African heritage. I hope that young people will come to see them in droves, that it will help young people get a better grasp of who we are and to learn tolerance. My grand plan is to allow love to guide me."

Every year the festival celebrates a film artiste who has made an outstanding contribution to the representation of black people and culture on screen. This year the first Caribbean Tales Youth Film Festival Award of Honour was presented to acclaimed African American filmmaker Julie Dash. Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991) was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant".

Next year's honoree is Euzhan Palcy. Palcy is a film director from Martinique, French West Indies, who is noted for being the first black woman to direct a mainstream Hollywood film, A Dry White Season, which starred Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando. In 1983, Palcy won the Silver Lion award for her first film, Sugar Cane Alley, a poignant film set in the last days of slavery on a small Caribbean island.

For the future of the festival, Solomon said she hoped to expand it beyond Canada and has plans for a mini festival in Barbados next year.

A scene from A Winter's Tale, which is produced by Frances-Anne Solomon and will be shown at the 2010 Caribbean Tales Youth Film Festival. - Contributed