Mas Man’ Film on Peter Minshall Continues Awards Streak

Mas Man, a film about artist-designer Peter Minshall, produced and directed by Dalton Narine, won the Long Beach International Film Festival prize (http://www.longbeachindie.com) for Best Feature Documentary on Oct. 11, in Long Beach, a city in Los Angeles County.

Dr. Daniel Walker, scholar, filmmaker and founding director of the illustrious festival, spoke about the film’s appeal and the jury’s decision.

“As a person who wrote a book about the political dimensions of festivals in Cuba and New Orleans, I know I had a high bar to impress, and the film did all that and more.”

A few weeks earlier, Narine had hoped Mas Man would fare well at the Fine Arts Film Festival in Venice, Los Angeles. “The film drew enthusiastic appraisal from the audience,” Festival director Juri Koll said.

Dalton Narine, producer/director, Mas Man, wins
Long Beach International Film Festival
 Best Documentary prize, the film’s 15th award

“Mas Man is, above all, a fine arts film,” Narine says, “though juries at fifty or so festivals around the world, had promoted it in every category imaginable.”

Still, with the film’s latest success, coupled with the tourism prize it received at Document Arts Fest in Bucharest, Romania (as well as its screening in Cannes) both in the past year, Mas Man has amassed 15 prizes across the board. They include Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography and special awards.

Narine says he pushed the film in the Los Angeles area because Don Mischer, a Hollywood producer featured in the film, was a key figure in tapping Minshall, the masman himself, for the Barcelona Olympic Games’ opening ceremonies in 1992.

Minshall reprised his role as an artistic director of the Emmy award-winning opening ceremonies at the1996 Atlanta Games, and Salt Lake City Winter Games in 2002, for which he received an Emmy.

That Mas Man made an auspicious debut is testament to its staying power.

Peter Minshall, remembered as Best artist/designer in
Trinidad's Carnival for three decades (Photo: Courtesy Dalton Narine) 

A full-house screening in New York City’s Greenwich Village, proved that Narine and his crew could transform a pastiche of scenes that won the People’s Choice Award for Best Feature Documentary at the 2009 Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival to the top tier of the New York Film Festival in 2010.

 “In Trinidad, we had a week to put it together,” Narine recalls, “just so the public would get an inkling regarding what the noise was about. It was a ways from being a film. Not even a work in progress. Call it ideas.”

Narine credits not only Callaloo Company’s Peter Minshall and Todd Gulich, but also filmmakers Benedict Joseph and Danielle Dieffenthaller, editor Eduardo Siu, Pennelope Beckles,Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival founder/director Dr. Bruce Paddington, as well as Trinidad & Tobago Film Company and GISL for their contribution, particularly as the film underwent a period of gestation.

From left,Todd Gulich, managing director, Callaloo Co.,
Peter Minshall, an artistic director of the 1996 opening ceremonies for the
 Atlanta Olympic Games and Hollywood producer Don Mischer,
 on eve of the Emmy Award-winning extravaganza. (Photo: Callaloo Co.)

Back then, to accommodate festivals, it required Narine to transfer Mas Man to HD hard drive and Blu-ray.

“Today, the medium is Digital Cinema Package (DCP), and we had it mounted, at huge cost,  in Hollywood, where the film had a screening at the legendary Ricardo Montalban Theater at Hollywood and Vine.”

“Now, it is screenable at any movie house anywhere in the world,” Narine says. “I would love to have the 89-minute version shown at MovieTowne in this format. Of course, at the behest of Minshallites everywhere, we’ve been pushing a longer cut at 145 minutes on DVD.

Peter Minshall’s Papillon,
about the ephemeral nature of life,
a 2.000-strong portrayal in 1992 Trinidad’s Carnival
(Photo: Courtesy Callaloo Co.)

Mas Man has been screened in Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, Australia and the Caribbean. The film received Best Caribbean Film award in 2012 at a red carpet festival in Antigua that included a couple of American actors, a filmmaker from India, and the chair of Columbia University’s School of the Arts film division. It also prompted a stir of excitement in Jamaica media a few months ago.

But to Narine’s delight, a few Trinidadian students at US universities have studied the film as their thesis toward a master’s degree. And a group of UWI students chose the work for a class project a couple of years ago.

Mas Man, along with eight earlier Narine documentaries about T&T’s mas/pan culture, are available at masmanthemovie.com, Crosby’s, Cleve’s, Paper Based Bookshop (located at the Normandie Hotel), The M Store (Piarco Airport) and Sanch Electronix, Curepe.

Dalton Narine's 'King Carnival' at BFI We ♥ Carnival Screenings 2013

The Dalton Narine film King Carnival (1994) will feature in the 'we love carnival' series at BFI South Bank London on Saturday 10th of August from 11:00 AM.

Stephen Rudder's 'Sequins Soca and Sweat' (2006) will also feature on the bill.

"Screenings and previews of new work, live performance and discussions exploring the art, history, culture and politics of the Caribbean Carnival in London and Trinidad. The day will be hosted by Michael La Rose of Savannah View and chair of the George Padmore Institute with special guest, director Horace Ové. Films include King Carnival (UK-USA-W Ger 1973. Dir Horace Ové. 50min); King Carnival (Trinidad 1994. Dir Dalton Narine. 61min); and Sequins, Soca and Sweat (UK 2006. Dir Stephen Rudder. 49min).

Tickets £7.50"

more info here

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Making Mas Man— End of a surreal journey

Peter Minshall works on the headpieces for his 1993 band Donkey Derby.
 PHOTO: MARK LYNDERSAY

DALTON NARINE

It happened on Ash Thursday the year he gave us his last mas. The 2006 Carnival was as good a hurrah as befits anyone like him. As cultivated and bombastic, strong-willed and emotive, combative and refreshing as perhaps any artist who shapes art only to distort it to make you realise you’re gaping at yourself in a mirror of horror. Even at your ownpristine, naked beauty. The Eden of self. For, you, too, are God.  And across time, we never got to figure out who HE was, whom he had become, though Peter Minshall himself says it all. “On Carnival Tuesday night, Tribe is coming up, and this is where I observe a fact of modern Carnival life that I had not even known to exist. It was like a juggernaut, a cavalcade of 40-foot trailer trucks, about 20 of them, huge, towering above me, and ten of them were bars for the all-inclusive consumption of alcohol; and ten more were the shower sprinklers to keep the delicate folk cool on a hot tropical day; and ten more were food, and if there were any more left over they were in between those for music. “And they were going by like if it was the desert war again and they had an enemy to conquer. These huge trucks, and in between these chasms created by the trucks were these little sprinklings of people with a few little beads and a few little feathers. “I thought, my God, I had no idea that this was where de ting reach. Where the form had so taken over that it has absolutely eradicated the substance.”

He relaxes a little and eases back onto the stool, for he’s in a crouch, his eyes penetrating mine and waiting for them to breathe again. The pause lingers, it seems, for as long as the annual Memorial Park, Anthony-Quinn-in-The-long-Wait period before your band is waved onto the Drag. “It was biblical, this march of thundering trucks, the technology and the mechanism. Huge. It was quite spectacular in its own way. I felt like a little fella in a pirogue, you know, and the waves and the wake ...” He cups his chin in the palm of his hand, eyes straying on an old costume leaning against a wall across by so. And then it came, the wave blowing us both back in the day.  Oui foute! “I didn’t know it was so.” That scene in the Callaloo mas camp is a telling dialogue of an old actor like Brando, who had come back from irrelevance to write his own epitaph at the end of Apocalypse Now even as he was spitting robber talk flecked with mimicry from the Bookman from Hell. No one will ever dismiss Brando’s brief role in a long, harrowing tale. And I will forever recall that epic summation and distillation of where Minshall had been and where the mas was heading. He didn’t know it was so.

Director of 'Mas Man' Dalton Narine

I didn’t know either that the cogs in the mas that turned the wheels had long been worn smooth when I arrived at offices, public and private, cap in hand, a vagrant filmmaker on the prowl for change. “A documentary about Minshall?” she said. “What if he doesn’t bring another band?” Well, he designed 26, and, no, it’s a film about Minshall. I’d learned that from  Pennelope Beckles. “They’ll take you seriously if you call it a film.” The minister made a phone call and redirected the team to T&T Film Company, the only foundation for moral support, as it turned out. It wasn’t a grand largesse, per se, but it spirited us out of a pinch. I’m reminded of the line by sculptor Anna Serrao, who made mas with galvanise, our own metal, as Minshall termed it. “Not so much for how it looks but how it sounds in the rainy season. The dropping of the rain on it is not so far from the din and the melody of a pan. Such sweet shelter.” Minshall could talk, yes. But Serrao didn’t see it like that. “This is hard mas. Hard. It’s like we have to find a rationale for our craziness.” Those were hard, hard days, too, for the team—Benedict Joseph behind the camera and Danielle Dieffenthaller hosting meetings at her home to pitch for interviewees and strategise. We never did meet the ordinary woman who walked around with a fount of knowledge about the mas. Nor did we locate the John John villager who had planted in her front yard a standard from her Calabash character to ward off evil forces. What a story, she! And the times were especially not galvanising for me, because I’d always been the point man, going brave into the jungle —wary of the enemy, the rest of the troops at safe distance to the back. Every office settled in the bush. As example, an officer chose my pitching opportunity to talk randomly about things in general. Money may have been my objective, but for sure not his object or thing that he could hand out without stretching the ole talk, ad infinitum. After four trips to the “bank”, I eventually caught on to the ritual. 

The spirit broken, you become a sycophant because you must make nice, in letters, in person, on the phone. In the bush, where you’re held captive. Unless you realise it and end up receding back to reality. So, it wasn’t difficult making mas man. But it was excruciatingly painful doing so with the bank’s money. And myriad other forms of financing so that you’re able to skip from an interview session on the east coast of America to the west, where Hollywood treated you like a man. A filmmaker. Don Mischer, an exceedingly gracious and famous producer who ran the Atlanta and Salt Lake City Olympic Games, excused himself from a meeting in the midst of planning an entertainment show for the Super Bowl, American football’s World Cup, to chat for an hour about Minshall and how Minsh virtually ran meetings about the opening ceremonies. “All Peter had to say was, ‘Imagine, if you will,’ and he held us in the palm of his hands.”

Then you look around when he takes a call and count off 14 Emmys decorating the office. The guy I hired as camera operator, himself a filmmaker, looked at it as another ornate set, but with the Hollywood sign gracing the hill, yet bleeding through a window as backdrop. 

I had come from a good vibe in Greenwich Village, New York, where we had coupled two major interviews in a restaurant setting. The scenario unspooled radically well between the theatre director and the university professor, the only odd take on that cold morning  arriving unscripted from a cop who was about to ticket the rental car. And it’s all on video, the mad scramble to unhinge the mike on the lapel of the winter coat so I could  remonstrate in vain with New York’s Finest, and Joseph actually recording the predicament—force-feeding an outtake, though there was no technical error involved. Never trust your senses about an interview, for it will go to any lengths to get its way. And it’ll cost you. Indeed, filmmaking is a pricey endeavour. Like waking up to find that someone had keyed your car in the dead of night, bleeding off the paint as if it were coursing your vital vein. Instead, it was your own soul that had been scarred in broad daylight. If it wasn’t the shoe leather sponsorship trip wearing you down and out, it was the pick-up line Minsh gave when I initially called about the film that kept you going. He’d shunted the conversation that Sunday morning by assigning the moment to the cosmos. He must have known I’d been a pannist for years.

“The universe patient, eh?” he said, alluding to pan’s labyrinthian evolution over 62 years up till that day. How it start off fighting for its wee life and fending off know-it-all authority and its family who tried so hard to care for it, changing its face and voice and garb—even its reason for being—each member claiming her or a little piece of her; all such upbringing leading to a social network of friends and other countrymen, this new world at long last embracing her chromed and steely tone as a credible instrument for social change; all of that history bollixed up in the hills and the yards, and just now shrinking inside an outer universe that so patient, so patient eh boy? Well, that’s how Mas Man was born. Time knocking on the door for story to tell. I mean to say, look how the fella come from so far and get so big...big, big, big in the pantheon of the arts, pan and Minshall both. The one he calls the concert music of the Caribbean  and the other he reverently refers to as Mas Man. One and the same, if you ask me.

 After all it was a steel band derivative in mas, fancy sailor, which took a decade to mature from suck-meh-nose, that he carried in his head long before England called him to study this other world of upper-crust art. The rock of his belief in the mas, he would remind the old world of his epiphany of the streets dancing around him in his youth; crab, camera, cash register, clock, elephant, Donald Duck, cobra, fruits, flowers—anything a Trini sailor man could conceive to tote atop his head that would eventually turn new mas. New mas, indeed. That’s what he returned home from his studies to make. From the Land of the Hummingbird. Paradise Lost, where we bounce up in 1976 in Stephen and Elsie Lee Heung’s mas camp in Woodbrook. 

How you believe you could transport Milton’s epic poem into breadfruit art? Eh? Into we ting. Well, by God, he did it. Maybe the best mas ever, transforming even itself. And so I was hooked as I watched stanza after stanza unfurl before the camera... Minshall was the man then—and now. His name will live for a hundred years a bandleader said in the film, which The Callaloo Company sanctioned after, let’s put it this way, just one interview question. Minshall: “How are you planning to do this film?” Me: No narration. 
The stew required nothing else. I had the ingredient. I would have walked out of his home if my modus operandi wasn’t taken seriously. Minshall has voice, panache, cojones and erudition. Yet, there’s a missing link. He still can’t fathom the truth that the best footage is recorded on 11,000 tapes that dwell in 500 boxes in an old rum bond in Laventille. They remained untouchable for five years during the making of Mas Man. But in the bush you learn to make do with what you have, and editor Eduardo Siu and I are proud to roll out a three-DVD home video of a film that has won nine awards on six continents. More than five hours of Minshall’s Carnival art and Olympic artistry as a result of our take-no-prisoners attitude toward independent filmmaking.

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MAS MAN: THE COMPLETE WORK

Dalton Narine's "Mas Man The Complete Work" will have its media screening at NALIS next Wednesday 26th of September 2012 at 6 pm. If you cant wait however, the web store is open and you can purchase the DVD NOW at the new website, http://www.masmanthemovie.com/
Let's hear the Director Dalton Narine's introduction of this new 3 disk treasure trove.

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Mas Man—A work of art: As told to BC Pires

Dalton Narine

My name is Dalton Narine and I’ve just completed the upgrade of Mas Man: The Complete Work, my documentary about Peter Minshall. My mother and father lived on the same Laventille street as Rudolph Charles and Franklyn Ollivierra of Phase II. I learned to write at Richmond Street Boys Primary. Under Mr Carrington, I was an essayist at eight years old. I’ve lived in Miami most of my life.

One afternoon, my father was teaching me to tell time on a clock with a big face. A man dashed in and told him, “Come quick. Yuh wife just drown. They trying to revive she.” She died several months later at the hospital. My father escorted me to Fatima to be denied entrance because, the priest said, I was English Catholic and could be snatching space from a real Roman Catholic. I’d never seen him cry, but, that morning, his tears stained the Fatima gate. When my sister got through the front door of Bishop’s, his heart lightened. 

I’ll owe the bank till I die for all the loans to produce the film. It cost me $3.5 million. It was worth every penny. I attended Howard University, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, New York University and the University of Miami. All that tertiary education was funded through the GI Bill for veterans. My schooling in Trinidad helped put me over the top in the university’s entrance exams. I was the only student in the dorm to begin as a sophomore. 

I yearned to be a writer, not a black writer. I was one of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s top speakers. David Susskind chaired a discussion with me and three other veterans about the war for an hour on national TV. That led to an award-winning documentary, No Vietnamese Ever Called me Nigger, which still plays on college campuses. 

Esquire magazine were looking for an articulate black Vietnam veteran to chronicle racial warfare on the front lines. I returned to the killing fields as a civilian writer with the rank of major. Really, it was a death wish, because I should have died on the battlefield alongside 53 buddies who got wasted by our Air Force bombers near the Cambodian border.

Osibisa, the African/Caribbean pop band, emerged as the black Santana. My collection includes all their LPs and CDs. I know (founder-member keyboardist) Robert Bailey well. I planned to use my favourite song, Woyaya, in a scene about grunts partying in a hootch the night before a 30-day operation. The lyrics are apropos to such an uncertain mood: We are going/ Heaven knows where we are going/It will be hard we know/ And the road will be muddy and rough. Woyaya resides in my Mac. 

Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead; James Joyce’s Ulysses; and The Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 Russian film, changed my life most. Hands down, Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah are my favourite directors. Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film, though I was closer to Oliver Stone’s Platoon. I didn’t see the documentary The Fog of War. But I lived it.

I began shooting Mas Man in 2005-6. I spent a year trying to interest ministries and the private sector. (Then Tourism Minister Howard) Chin Lee’s office response was, “What if Minshall never brings another band?” Penelope Beckles, bless her heart, spoke with the film company, which eventually helped out with $100,000. The short version was rushed for the 2009 TT Film Festival. The Complete Work was achieved after 20-something cuts. 

The 89 minutes of Mas Man represents seven years’ hard labour for me. We plan to roll out the upgraded and rebranded work as a three-disc collection, more than five hours of Mas Man. I made Mas Man as a work of art about a work of art. A man from a tiny Caribbean island who reached 80 per cent of the planet in a single night.  

The best thing about making Mas Man was being in Minshall’s company, an erudite storyteller. The worst part was grovelling for funds. I could make a film about that runaround! My greatest regret was that I didn’t get better quality footage from the Ministry of Information. But GISL did the best they could under the circumstances and I appreciate their effort. A Trini is someone who lives life to the fullest until the cup runs over and spills out as ole talk. To me, Trinidad and Tobago means many nice times.

SOURCE:www.guardian.co.t

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The sad saga of Judah: Burn victim faces multiple surgeries in Miami

Judah Lovell... scarred in a bamboo ‘bussing’ incident.
Photos: Dalton Narine

Miami—A father and son occupy a room at Spring Hill Suites, Miami, 2,600 kilometres from their hometown in La Canoa, Santa Cruz.. They have become guests of fate. And they wait on time. Judah Lovell, seven, has been scarred by two surgeries performed 15 months ago at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex in Mt Hope. An innocent observer of innocent fun, he had taken a full-frontal assault from a “bamboo-bussing” adventure that went awry in the presence of neighbourhood children and his brothers, Eron, 12, and Jamal, 10.

From that moment on, Michael Lovell and his son—who comes from a mixed-race heritage—have been trapped in an enduring downhill roller-coaster trip that he hopes will take a new slant and bend upward, someday, somehow, to the disposition of a higher power. Meanwhile, at the family home “up Kingston Avenue,” Oma Jankey, wife and mother, might have located the will and faith to decipher the hard knocks of a life that has buckled so primitively just so; nevertheless she finds guilt, and pain over her grief that “something like that shouldn’t have happened while I was at home.”

“It hard, it hard,” she says. “It sad.” Jankey places a daily call to her husband and son, holed up, like hibernating animals, at the Spring Hill Suites near the Jackson Memorial Hospital in an unseasonably wintry sub-tropical city, where the first surgery of Judah’s new life will be performed perhaps in a matter of weeks. “He’s in good spirits,” Jankey says. “But he cries sometimes. He says he’s missing me. I tell him I’m waiting until he comes back. He knows I must take care of his year-and-a-half-old sister, Sapphire. He and I have such a close relationship.”

Vivid recollections of trauma haunt her: Judah’s Lakers jersey is ablaze, grabbing at the upper body and neck, peeling the skin away. Her mother, Indra Jankey, celebrating her birthday that Sunday, October 11, 2009, rushing toward him. He bawling, she pulling the garment over his head. Jankey making the call to his father, who is on a landscaping job four minutes away. The son, a lefty, his body blackened, rolling the eyes wide with fright. Burns from belly to neck, and on the left hand, too, pushing him to ask, “Daddy, am I going to die?” Michael dashing off in his car with the boy, horn screaming and lights blinking all the way to the hospital.

But the nightmare is barely in its infancy. Lovell and Jankey spin a single thread into the longest rope that doesn’t seem to have an end. The unspooling begins, really, at the hospital. She, pleading with the doctor not to graft skin on the healing wounds. The doctor, shooting back that the throat is a tricky area, and she’ll have to live with that if he doesn’t graft. Two skin grafts later, emotions run helter-skelter within the family. Allegations of irregular bandage changes—sometimes five days overdue—reach the ears of doctors and nurses. Untreated flesh stink like rotting meat, is how the couple press their case. “The doctor’s negligence disfigured my child for life,” Jankey says.

(A head nurse informs a caller that “everything went well,” and promises to transfer the call to the doctor, which, weirdly or not, leads to a dead end.) More bitterness piles on. Lovell is searching for answers from authorities, but there seems to be no recourse. No remorse, either. A stroke befalls him. Now, Jankey is flashing back again. There’s an open wound in Judah’s neck, like someone had cut off a piece of skin. The neck has a pocket, like a kangaroo’s. Bacteria settle in. The skin is bursting around the neck, forming holes. Two, then three. Pus, a product of inflammation, oozing from the neck and filling two glasses. It smells like death. So, it’s back to the paediatric ward.

A recovering Judah lucks into a routine of arts and craft, which is taught by a person affiliated with a non-governmental organisation (NGO). Unable to tilt his head up or down and left or right, without bending or turning his body, he finds the sensation of stringing coloured beads into objects of his fancy a compensatory occupation. And bestows his artwork upon patients in the ward, as he does with gifts he receives from family and well-wishers.

In the meantime, good Samaritans have been rallying to Judah’s predicament. Ian Alleyne, presenter of Crime Watch on WinTV, Carol Boon, Anna-Lisa Habib, Dave Surajdeen and Kathryn Stollmeyer-Wight, among a host of others, bring national focus to the family’s plight. Stollmeyer-Wight is encouraged by a Mt Hope doctor’s summation about multiple surgeries to be performed in Miami. “By then, Judah’s story had become an incredible journey,” Stollmeyer-Wight says. “I put the story on my Facebook page. Then it took on a life of its own. People saw the wounds in the photographs. It opened their hearts. I grew up ‘bussing’ bamboo myself in Santa Cruz, and I just couldn’t see this little boy growing up so scarred.”

Facebook friends reach out from every corner of the world, shovelling all manner of aid and relief to the family.

Now it is left to someone like St Clair-based Ian Kalloo, managing director of Dalian Medical Concierge Services Ltd, an interactive medical management for people with group health insurance, to provide the key role in the final chapter of the Trinidad saga of Judah’s struggle. Because, since specialist medical care was required in the US, it was necessary to liaise with Olympus Ltd, Dalian’s US counterpart.

Kalloo would need to run interference between both companies on behalf of Judah. Kalloo and Dr Dale Maharaj, his business partner, hooked up with plastic surgeon Dr Ravindra Lalla and Deputy Speaker Fuad Khan. The association’s brainstorm inspires Dalian and Olympus to negotiate an initial deposit from US$250,000 to US$40,000.

Two major surgeries will address a majority of Judah’s problems, according to Kalloo. “Cosmetic surgery will be necessary, too,” he said. Stollmeyer-Wight and Ian Alleyne, Kalloo reminds, “have been instrumental in putting it all together,” including the trip to Miami. Judah and his father arrive with Stollmeyer-Wight. Facebook friends Trinidadian-born Jinnah Emamdee and his wife Carol greet the party at the hotel.  Emamdee remembers Judah’s face as calm but sad.  “I saw a child that was in pain,” he said. “It was the necklace made out of rope around his neck that really caught my eye... It was the skin of his neck.”

His new friends bring warmth whenever they visit, and Judah gifts them key chains from his alligator and lizard collection and a tiny Christmas tree, all of which he manufactures from a stash of beads he keeps next to his stuffed animals at his bedside. The other day, father and son, accompanied by Stollmeyer-Wight, swing by the popular, cavernous Dadeland Mall. She buys the boy a balloon. Minutes later, she notices that he has pulled his shirt over his neck and face; and now he’s shielding his distortion with the balloon. “People were gawking at him and he didn’t want them to see him disfigured,” Stollmeyer-Wight recalls. “Judah will get these operations somehow,” she says. “We’re not going to give up on him. He deserves better.”

DALTON NARINE

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Dalton Narine at the New York Film Festival.

Dalton Narine, right, received the New York International Film Festival Best Documentary Award last Thursday night in Beverly Hills, Calif. Afterward, he joins countryman Damian Marcano, left, and Jamaican-born Alexa Bailey, director and producer, respectively, of "The Little Boy and the Ball," which played Friday at the Los Angeles International Film Festival in Culver City, Los Angeles. Narine's film, "Mas Man Peter Minshall" was also screened at the festival. Mas Man received its fifth award at the South Africa International Festival on Saturday.

Dalton Narine stands with his Best Documentary Award for "Mas Man Peter Minshall" at the New York International Film Festival reception held last Thursday night in Beverly Hills, California. ( UNOFFICIAL PHOTOS BY GALE JAMES)

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MAS MAN WINS MORE INTERNATIONAL AWARDS.

International Film Fest
 South Africa.

The Dalton Narine documentary on Trinidad and Tobago's  internationally acclaimed  costume designer Peter Minshall, entitled 'Mas Man', has won two more international film awards over the weekend.

New York Int  fIlm fest.

At the International  film festival South Africa, 'Mas Man' won the 'Best Documentary' award. Narine,  could not be in South Africa at the time to collect the award because he was in Hollywood for the Los Angles Film Festival that started on Friday, he was also their to collect the award for the 'Best Short Documentary' from the New York International Film Festival.

In a message to  Peter Minshall and 'Mas Man' fans world wide  Dalton Narine  paid tribute not only to Peter Minshall  and Trinidad and Tobago, but also gave thanks to a still growing Peter Minshall fan base called the 'Peter Minshall Mas Fans' on face book, and also identified the possibility that there is more in store for the widely acclaimed documentary. Narine reports,
" In my speech, I paid tribute to Trinidad and Tobago,  Peter Minshall  and mas fans everywhere. The entire affair was recorded on film for  the International Film Quarterly, a trade publication, and the New  York International Film Festival.

Mas Man get it now!

Thanks to your facebook page and ALL the fans, for whom this award is  dedicated, the story about Mas Man Peter Minshall has grown  exponentially in the past nine months, and I appreciate the support  from all quarters. Of course, many thanks are due to Peter Minshall,  Todd Gulick, interviewees in the film, The Callaloo Company, the  production crew, particularly Benedict Joseph and Eduardo Sui,  Trinidad and Tobago Film Company and local media.

Meanwhile, I've been approached by several distribution outlets, a few  in New York but most in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, Calif.

It amazes that so many honchos in the independent film community are  aware of the film and its success. So, I've decided to sign with a  distribution company, which has developed a marketing strategy to mine  the film's potential and advance its possibilities.

As soon as the Hollywood award reception photos become available,  they'll be forwarded to Facebook, TTFC and Trinidad and Tobago media.

Dalton Narine"

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MAS MAN @ the Portobello Film Festival TODAY!!

The final cut of Dalton Narines documentary MAS MAN will be featured at the Portobello Film Festival toadyat 6:50 p.m., Mas Man screens at Inn on the Green at Portobello Film Festival. the address is 3-5 Thorpe Close, London W10 5XL Tel: 020 8962 5757 the  nearest station is Ladbroke Grove stationon the Hammersmith and City line.