Dear Editor,
I was thrilled to witness the great event that took place on Friday at the Theatre Guild. The Loyola Film Festival is the yearly event which has its motto as “if you’ve a camera…challenge is yours”. The organizers of LFF have a specific goal in mind whilst hosting this event. They would like our young people to take part in it. The director of the Catholic Media Rev. Justin Prabhu expressed strongly that everyone captures the real issues on their toy cameras on a regular basis and just forget about it. It is crucial to our changing world to turn our little video footages into documentaries. He stressed the fact that our young people are glued to gadgets and its technologies, hence they must be encouraged to do some serious work with their cameras and phone to produce documentaries.
The LFF intends basically to nurture the young budding talents specially to do documentaries and intends to encourage the young to be the writers. The event on Friday had about ten documentaries both in the amateur and professional category. I was happy to see so many young persons taking part in producing these documentaries. This is a wonderful opportunity that the Catholic Media initiative has given to our young people irrespective of their religion. I wish and hope this continues in this nation. Good works have to be acknowledged and encouraged in this beautiful country.
The Catholic Media also had organised a summer programme for about twenty young persons on the new media and its impact among the people. The new media like blogging, radio presentation, writing and other aspects on mass communication. We have to keep our young persons rolling as they are in their off time.
Having said that, I would like point out an important issue about films of Guyana. A few months ago I watched a Guyanese film by Mahadeo Shivraj. How many of us encourage our own artists on the big screen or we look for someone glamorous from Bollywood and Hollywood? I think our nation has talent and potential to be a great film nation. We need to start looking at our own talent and potential. We need to encourage our young ones to make documentaries and eventually have a “jollywood”.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address supplied)
