New partnership to bring Caribbean films to Roku

Access to wider audiences has long been an obstacle for filmmakers in Trinidad and Tobago (TT) and the Caribbean. Now, the Filmmakers Collaborative of TT (Filmco) has teamed up with the newly launched Pavilion+ streaming platform to make Caribbean movies and TV shows more accessible to viewers in the Caribbean diaspora in the US, UK and Canada.

A partnership with the Roku streaming platform means Filmco content will also be available on this platform.

Audiences across the Caribbean diaspora and viewers with keen interests in the Caribbean can enjoy Filmco’s expansive catalogue and slate of original films on the Pavilion+ platform for free. Filmco is a distribution platform designed to give filmmakers in TT and the wider Caribbean who are part of the Filmco collaborative the opportunity to monetize their content through licensing and distribution.

The strong and vibrant membership organisation’s core areas of focus are the distribution of films and television series, management of the annual TT film festival (ttFF), and industry-specific professional development and training.

Pavilion+ from Pavilion Entertainment offers the best Caribbean TV, movies, and documentaries streaming on The Roku Channel, giving users the opportunity to discover and enjoy exclusively Caribbean content for free.

Filmco’s co-founder Mariel Brown said, “For many Caribbean filmmakers and television producers, gaining access to audiences is a crucial but often missing link in their work’s value chain. Our growing partnership with Pavilion is helping to connect all the pieces of the chain, and we’re excited to expand the appetite for and access to Caribbean content with Pavilion, while building more sustainable livelihoods for our stakeholders.”

Speaking to Sunday Newsday via e-mail, Brown said the partnership with Pavilion and Roku came about through a collaboration with Pavilion’s founder, Gian Franco.

“We have been working with Pavilion's founder, Gian Franco, since 2020 to bring Caribbean movies and TV shows to Roku. The Roku relationship is Gian's and he shares our passion for Caribbean films. The Pavilion partnership is one in our growing distribution offering.”

She said having access to online platforms gives Filmco an advantage in today’s digital world.

“The internet and online platforms have fundamentally changed the way many people view and engage with movies and TV shows. While many established distributors have been struggling to make the switch, at Filmco we embrace the kind of access to audiences that the online space can potentially offer over traditional broadcasters. Certainly, there is a lot more flexibility in the online space than there is with the traditional broadcasters, and that adaptability is important for us as a young distributor. Now that we're finding ways to have Caribbean content on these platforms, it's massively important that we promote and market the availability. We can't just expect that audiences will come.”

She said the titles being offered on the Roku platform were chosen to bring attention to Caribbean works.

“Gian's strategy for selecting the initial offering of films and TV shows for Roku has been to go with titles that can have mass appeal. His thinking is that first we bring the audiences, and once we have them, then we can experiment with more niche titles."

In a release, Filmco said the titles available on Pavilion+ represent the wide variety of creative output of its members and stakeholders, including films across a range of genres, such as documentaries, classic Caribbean films, action movies, student films, and more.

It said one classic film available on the platform is the 1974 film Bim, which follows a young Bheem Singh who is sent to live with his aunt in Port of Spain after his father’s death. Bullied at school and abused at home, he runs away and begins a life of petty crime that eventually catches up with him. The film, written by Raoul Pantin and directed by Hugh A. Robertson, was described by co-founder and ttFF chairman Dr Bruce Paddington, as "one of the most important films to be produced in TT and…one of the classics of Caribbean cinema."

Other Filmco titles offered on the site include dramatic thrillers such as The Cutlass and the heart-pumping student film Pendulum. Inspired by true events, The Cutlass tells the story of a young woman who falls into the grasp of a dangerous sociopath. Completely isolated in the tropical wilderness of Trinidad, she has no other choice but to muster the courage to emotionally battle the unsettled mind of her abductor. Pendulum follows Luther, the CEO of a major software company in Trinidad who has a stalker intent on doing him harm. He calls in Ryan, an old friend and former soldier who is battling with post-traumatic stress disorder, to protect him. Ryan tracks down the stalker and is forced to kill him, but in so doing, makes a shocking discovery.

The documentary Inward Hunger: The Story of Eric Williams explores in-depth the life and legacy of Dr Eric Eustace Williams, TT’s first prime minister. Williams was a complex and controversial Caribbean figure, best known for leading TT to Independence in 1962 and for his seminal and once controversial book, Capitalism and Slavery. Directed by Brown, Inward Hunger is a pioneering documentary series that reveals Williams in unprecedented breadth and depth, in the context of the world that shaped him, the forces to which he at times succumbed, and those he fought to change.

Pavilion+ can be accessed at https://pavilionplus.co/. Brown said while Roku is only available in North America and the UK, there are many Caribbean titles available to audiences anywhere in the world on Filmco’s subscription-based platform, Filmco2Go, which can be accessed at www.filmco.org/filmco2go.