Maracas Valley Studio Productions

Films

Description

“City on a Hill” is a documentary film capturing the built and cultural heritage of East Port Of Spain and exploring how the contributions made by this urban settlement may be harnessed for economic growth. Through archival research, interviews with residents, and historical markings on the landscape, the film captures the proud identity of the people of the districts on the eastern fringe of the city of Port of Spain that are collectively called Laventille. Past and present history and its rich built and cultural heritage are gleaned through testimonies of creativity and survival of its citizens young and old.

The film was commissioned as one of the outputs of a project entitled “Leveraging built and cultural heritage for economic development in East Port of Spain” executed under the Research and Development Impact Fund of the University of the West Indies. This project and the film connects to a larger initiative in the Laventille area. The University of the West Indies (UWI), via the Caribbean Network for Urban and Land Management (CNULM) has been working with the East Port of Spain Council of Community Organizations (EPCCO) in facilitating a community response to the Heritage City Growth Pole Initiative (HCGPI) since October 2010 whereby the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (GORTT) together with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) have proposed to establish a heritage complex at the “top of the hill” which will see significant urban revitalization in the area.

The documentary works against the grain of what has been conventionally presented about the Laventille area, reversing the images of violence, indolence, poverty and alienation that have been etched into its hillside and valleys. In media portrayal, dating back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, visitor’s accounts, colonial papers, and transcripts in missionary accounts, to current coverage of criminality, Laventille has been presented as a haven for outcasts from the polite urban settlement of Port of Spain. So ingrained is the script of undesirability of this terrain, that a younger generation still continues to sculpt its likeness in the image of the one that it has inherited, exemplified primarily in the gang warfare that pervades.

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The contestation for space undeniably marks those who live here. The landscape with its cheek by jowl housing, invisible borderlines that distinguish one territory from another and the general fear of being in someone else’s space, has now become a metaphor for today, echoing the original struggle from which the community was initially built. The legacy of violence persists, utilized by state authorities to maintain levels of vulnerability and dependency, un-regarding of the creative potential that remains untapped. Repetitive negative images are privileged over the many accomplished musicians, artists and creative personalities who have emerged from these very communities to shape a key component of the musical sound and aesthetic sensibility of this nation.

Through interviews with representatives from the various neighbor-hoods covered, through the stories of those who continue to persevere in their chosen creative field, and by exposing the magnificence of historical landmarks through a view from the hill, the film presents both the people of Laventille and the nation with a reason to be proud of a place that is crucial in the formation of modern urban Trinidad. The camera moves between religious archetype and human archetype, i.e. churches, mosques, statues, flags and so on, to the elders’ stories, and to the homegrown aesthetic found in the shop fronts, gardens, broken down shacks, built up spaces and rubbish heaps. It is hoped that this reordering of the tangible and intangible provides an alternative vision for continued development of this area. A spatially mapped Geographic Information System (GIS) model for urban development draws on the researched inventories of oral and cultural history. Rather than leaving them open as pawns in the struggles of each new political regime to gain credibility, the model supports the community’s vision on how it might harness its own resources and bring economic relief to those who are unemployed or under employed, providing possibilities for a pathway out of crime and indigence which has for too long stigmatized the area.