Stories Worth Filming: Guyana at TIFF, Bushmaster, and the Long Road to a Film Industry

 

Brooklyn, New York. A photograph is making its way around Guyanese social media this week. Eleven people stand before a wall of Rupununi savannah, a harpy eagle, and the lit span of the Demerara Bridge. They wear lanyards. Behind them is a national stand at the Toronto International Film Festival, and this is the first time such a stand has existed. The image deserves a moment’s pause before the analysis begins, because the people in it have been waiting a long time for the wall behind them.

I. The Toronto Moment

Guyana’s first official presence at TIFF was announced in June and delivered in September. Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport Charles Ramson Jr. told an Orange Economy consultation at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre on 18 June that the country would attend the festival’s 51st edition for the first time, and called it a big opportunity. The festival ran from 10 to 20 September and launched its first official film market, which ran from 10 to 16 September. Guyana arrived as Toronto expanded its already established role in the film business.

The Minister’s case for film emphasised opportunities for young people, particularly those aged fifteen to twenty-four. He cited Trinidad and Tobago and Nigeria as countries developing the sector, arguing that wealth was not a prerequisite. He also pointed to the US series Full Circle, for which filmmaker Alex Arjoon arranged a Georgetown shoot: six months of preparation, three days of filming at the Stabroek wharf, and a spend the Minister put at half a million US dollars.

That anecdote is the hinge. A foreign production bringing US$500,000 into the local economy creates work and experience. Indeed, six months of preparation is hardly easy. But hosting foreign productions is to owning a film industry what hosting cruise ships is to owning a shipping line. The money lands; ownership can still sail away. Golden Arrowhead Productions, in the statement prompting this commentary, put the distinction plainly: an industry cannot stop at promoting Guyana as a beautiful place for other people’s films to visit. Instead, it must mean Guyanese productions, Guyanese actors, Guyanese music and Guyanese intellectual property that can travel.

Hosting foreign productions is to owning a film industry what hosting cruise ships is to owning a shipping line. The money lands; ownership can still sail away.

— T.R.B.

II. The Long Story

This journey did not begin in Toronto, and the Golden Arrowhead statement rightly insists on it. Guyanese film has a half-century of proof of existence behind it, many made with scarce resources and little institutional support, by people who kept making things anyway.

Hamley Case produced Aggro Seizeman in the mid-1970s, a comedy about a Georgetown repossession agent. Vivian Lee, the impresario of the ACE building and the Globe cinema shows of the 1960s, belongs to the same founding generation, as does H. Bhaichandeen. Writing in January 2013, a year after Lee’s death, Freddie Kissoon observed that the Stabroek News had omitted him from its list of notable passings. That is the fate the Golden Arrowhead statement’s phrase about flowers tries to forestall.

A later wave came through public support. The President’s Film Endowment of 2011 produced the eight shorts known as the CineGuyana set, which reached international audiences and helped train a new cohort. The current generation carries that work forward. Yaphet Jackman, Brooklyn-born and Guyana-raised, has worked as a cinematographer in the United States, founded Bent Street Films, launched Guyana’s 592 48-Hour Film Challenge, and taken on the quieter labour of documenting who came before him. Rae Wiltshire, Guyana Prize-winning playwright turned filmmaker, took Eating Papaw on the Seashore to BFI Flare in London in 2023 and then founded the Georgetown Film Festival, which first convened at the Theatre Guild in August 2024 and has given his generation a screen, a workshop and a reason to finish.

These efforts did not yet amount to a sustained industry. Even so, each helped lay its foundations. The lesson is familiar to anyone who has watched a mathematics department grow from a single determined teacher: the institution arrives last, and it arrives only because individuals refused to wait for it.

III. The Division of Labour

The Orange Economy is the right frame, and the Government deserves credit for adopting it. The phrase comes from the Inter-American Development Bank, which used it to describe the creative industries as a tradable sector with measurable output, not a line item in a culture ministry. A country undergoing an oil-driven economic transformation has every reason to ask what else it can export, and the Golden Arrowhead statement is right that the Ministry’s framework, the TIFF relationship, and the consultations are exactly what earlier creatives spent decades asking for.

But the statement also draws a line that policy documents tend to blur. Government can build the environment: the framework, the incentives, the international doors. However, it cannot substitute for the people who make the films. Filmmakers must make the work; actors must inhabit it; musicians, designers, technicians, makeup artists and the businesses that feed and house a crew must become an ecosystem. This is not a complaint about the state. Rather, it is a statement about what the state is for, and GBJ readers will recognise it as the same argument this journal has made about ports, hospitals and schools: public commitments must become working conditions, and working conditions must support lasting results.

The danger in any oil-era development agenda is that announcement substitutes for output. A delegation at TIFF is a beginning. By contrast, a finished Guyanese feature with a distribution deal is a result. The distance between the two is where industries are either built or talked about.

IV. Bushmaster as an Industrial Proposition

Into this gap Golden Arrowhead Productions has placed Bushmaster! A Modern Day Pepperpot Western, a planned feature set in Lethem and the Rupununi. The title is doing deliberate work. The western has travelled far beyond its American origins. Calling this one a pepperpot western therefore claims a Guyanese place within that tradition. The borrowed form is the western; pepperpot supplies a name rooted in Guyana’s Indigenous inheritance. The Rupununi’s savannahs, ranches and cattle culture, meanwhile, give that claim a landscape of its own.

What matters for this journal is what the production proposes to leave behind. Golden Arrowhead says its objective extends beyond one movie: to employ local actors and creatives, engage Guyanese businesses and communities, showcase locations for film tourism, put Guyanese music on the soundtrack, and deepen the production experience available locally. In other words, that describes a supply chain. The Stabroek wharf shoot shows what international production can bring; a Guyanese feature should help turn such experience into lasting local capacity.

The statement’s most important ambition extends beyond entertainment to industry-building. After all, one film does not make an industry. An industry begins to take shape when the next film can build on what the last one leaves behind: trained crews, accessible equipment, production relationships and routes to audiences. Bushmaster, on its own account, wants to make that next film easier to realise. That ambition is right, and it is testable.

An industry begins to take shape when the next film can build on what the last one leaves behind.

— T.R.B.

V. What an Industry Actually Requires

If the Government wants the Orange Economy to be more than a slogan, and if Golden Arrowhead wants Bushmaster to be more than a brave first film, four questions need practical answers. Each requires decisions that someone must make.

1. Who owns the intellectual property? A film’s long-term value lies partly in the rights to distribute, license, and adapt it. The IDB’s Orange Economy framework makes it clear that the creative economy is an intellectual-property economy. An overseas distribution agreement can open doors, but its terms determine how much control and future income remain with Guyanese creators. Public support should therefore make those terms visible and protect a meaningful Guyanese stake.
2. How is production financed? Goodwill alone, however, cannot carry production budgets. A credible framework should explain what support is available, who qualifies, how decisions are made and when funds will arrive. Development grants, carefully designed rebates and co-production partnerships are options to assess. A published, dependable system would give producers and financiers something firmer than ministerial enthusiasm to plan on.

VI. Markets, and the Next Crew

3. Who distributes? A finished feature needs a route to paying audiences, at home and abroad. Toronto’s expanded market, for example, offers a place to build those relationships. The real test of the trip, then, is what follows: credible sales representation, distribution agreements and financing discussions that move a project towards completion and release.
4. Where does the next crew come from? The 48-hour challenges, the Georgetown Film Festival workshops and the CineGuyana cohort are a training system built from spare parts. Nothing wrong with that; mathematics in Guyana was built the same way. The University of Guyana’s communications programme offers a foundation on which to build. The Government’s own argument about young people is a case for sustained training, access to equipment, and paid production placements.

None of these is Golden Arrowhead’s job alone, and none is the Ministry’s alone. That is the point of the division of labour the statement describes. The producer makes the film; the state makes the conditions; and the questions above are where the two meet.

VII. Flowers, and the Next Chapter

The Golden Arrowhead statement ends with a disclaimer that is also a vow: we are not trying to claim the industry as our own; we are joining a movement others built, and we intend to leave something behind. GBJ has long argued that Guyana’s oil moment will be judged not by what was announced but by what was left standing when the announcements stopped. The argument applies to film with unusual force, because film helps a country tell its story to itself and to the world.

So the flowers first. To Hamley Case, Bhaichandeen and Vivian Lee, who helped build a screen culture with little assurance of support. To the CineGuyana cohort, to Yaphet Jackman and Rae Wiltshire, to the Georgetown Film Festival and the diaspora filmmakers who carried Guyanese stories abroad long before this platform existed. Indeed, they are the reason there was a delegation to send.

Then the work. A pepperpot western shot in the Rupununi, financed in Guyana, scored by Guyanese musicians, owned by Guyanese rights-holders, and sold in Toronto: that would be proof of existence. Existence proofs are how industries begin. Then comes the harder work: making it repeatable.

Guyana has stories worth filming. The question now is who will own them.

The flowers are overdue. The industry is not yet built. Both can be true in the same photograph.

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