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Grab your popcorn. CTFF About to Open. Annual
Filmfest has Snakes on the Brain for Gala Night
By Stephen Weir
When the Caribbean Tales Film Festival (CTFF) opens in a
couple weeks, the first film of the annual flickfest will have the audience
thinking they have snakes on the brain when the theatre lights come back on. Rattlesnakes is a full- length feature that
has rattlers not just in the personalities of the principal actors but
literally on camera too.
The Canadian debut takes place September 4th, right on
College Street in Toronto’s Little Italy.
The film will be feted at the festival’s early evening 2019 kick-off and
street party, followed by an 8pm VIP filled screening across the street at the
Royal Cinema!
This is probably going to be the first movie an audience
will ever see where they will see the names of three snakes in the final
credits! Slash and Strike don’t get much screen time or any lines to speak, but
they do rattle audiences when the hiss and shake their tails at a key point in
the flick. The third snake, Delilah was a snake stand-in, whose best scenes
were probably shed by the movie’s editor!
The film is adapted from a stage play penned by red-hot
UK author and playwright Graham Ronald Farrow. Julius Amedume, the film’s
Ghanaian-British director worked with Farrow to come up with a tight 85-minute story. Rattlesnakes received its World Premier at
the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles earlier this year and snapped up
the Audience Award for Best Movie.
“ The movie is at one level close to the original British
play,” Haitian-French-American actor and producer Jimmy Jean-Louis told the
Caribbean Camera. “I am not white; in the movie I am kidnapped by three
business men who are. In the original
play everyone is white and the kidnappers are regulars Joes, one is a plumber.
We have changed that and it makes a significant difference (in the nuance of
the story)”
Pictured Right: Jimmy
Jean-Louis and Christian Oliver
It
is being called a neo-noir thriller, where nothing, except the rattlesnake, is
exactly what it seems. Jean-Louis plays a New Age guru, or, is he a sex
therapist bedding the unhappy wives of the kidnappers in a swank Santa Barbara retreat?
Fast paced, the film opens with the three cuckolded
husbands digging a grave for the therapist. They are enraged after a private
eye shows them damning pictures of what sort of therapy Jean-Louis delivers to
their unhappy wives (which they are paying for). They have agreed amongst
themselves to break into the California love nest and teach the guru a lesson
he probably isn’t going to survive!
The therapist is bound and beaten with a knuckle-breaking
hammer. And, before the torture ends, the kidnappers rip open his fly to see if
their wives might have been attracted to him because of the size of his penis!
“We never mention colour,” continues Jean-Louis. “ It’s the
unspoken word in the room, but it is an issues which the movie really hangs on.
IT really divides how audiences interpret Rattlesnakes.” According to the
movie’s director and star, husbands and wives can have many different
interpretations on what is all really about and who exactly the real bad people
are in the film.
Even though his hands and feed are tied the therapist
does gets his licks in telling each of the kidnappers how flawed their
marriages really are and how they are to blame.
It is a masterful performance by a Caribbean actor who hasn’t had much
exposure in Canada.
The once homeless actor is best known for his role as
"the Haitian" on the NBC television series Heroes and now has a
starring role on the television show Claws.
Pictured left: Jimmy
Jean-Louis and Kathleen McCellan
“I have worked on films in three Canadian cities: Vancouver,
Toronto and Montreal. I do know the country’s big cities,” said Jean-Louis. “This
time though I will get a good chance to explore Toronto. I will be up with you
for 8-days around the Festival.”
“Love the idea of the CTFF,” he continued. “I am going to
take part in their Incubator programme.
I want to pitch my next movie, it is also written by Julius
Amedume. It is a feature length Psychological Horror Thriller, that will
be shot in my country of origin, Haiti.”
“The film is called Mother Water and is fictional film,
based on the African Caribbean folk tale/ mythology of what some of you might
know as Mami Wata,” he said. “ Mami Wata
is a half-human, half-fish like deity, that comes from the sea to dwell on land
in human form, often to detrimental effect, depending on who she interacts with
or what she wants.”
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