Using both black and white, and colour video clips, filmmaker Andreas Antonopoulos takes his audience back in time, giving them a glimpses of TT many alive today have never seen.
A lecturer in the University of the West Indies’ Film Programme for the past two and a half years, Antonopoulos won the best new media award at the 2021 TT Film Festival with his ten-minute experimental documentary, Rhythms of Trinidad.
With assistance from the National Archives of TT, he wove a story of everyday life and culture.
There were images of people in groceries, military parades, men and women working in factories, working machinery at manufacturing plants, construction, Carnival, still advertisements, houses, trolleys moving along tramways on the roads, beasts of burden pulling a cart of sugarcane and more.
Interwoven between these images were dancers performing in costume – Spanish, Indian, African, and bele – and a slightly eerie score.
He told Sunday Newsday he was amazed that he won because, after working so long and hard on the film – going through 12 hours of archives, selecting clips, breaking them down and editing it down to ten minutes – all he was hoping to do was to show his work to an audience.
He said when films are made, the creators have no idea how audiences would receive them. People usually do not make films for themselves but for an audience so, in discussing his work at the film festival, he was glad to know people liked and understood what he was trying to do, which was his biggest reward.
It was also a pleasure to see some of his students’ work at the festival. He said it feels good when their screenings are successful and people appreciate their creativity. He is also proud because three films from his students were selected to be screened at a film festival in Germany in November.
[caption id="attachment_916652" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Greek filmmaker and UWI film lecturer, Andreas Antonopoulos. Photos courtesy Andreas Antonopoulos -[/caption]
Born in Athens, Greece, he attended film school at the University of Athens and, with a full scholarship, went on to do his master's in film at the Screen Academy Scotland in Edinburgh.
Since then, he has been making films while teaching at Napier Edinburgh University and Leeds Beckett University in the UK, before being invited to teach at UWI.
He said in high school, he spent a lot of time watching films and wondered how they were made so he went to film school as he did not have any other interests.
“After graduating, I spent a lot of time working in the media industry in Athens, mostly as an editor, which was great, but it was not for me. I wasn’t sure what I would find when I left Athens but I discovered there was more to do as an academic so when I went to the UK I focussed on teaching although I also like research and anything to do with academia.”
New Media is a broad term that could include anything produced for non-traditional media or for digital di
