takes us back in time…
While growing up we heard many stories of how life on the plantations was for our fore parents; we shared with our elders the customs passed on by their parents and we listened keenly to the struggles they went through, so that we can now live a free life. For the younger generation, that freedom is taken for granted and the struggles not really appreciated because all we did was hear about them, we never felt nor witnessed the whippings and constant abuse at the hands of the colonial masters.
In effort to educate the younger generation and also highlight the struggles of the indentured workers, Kishore Seunarine birthed the idea of “Echos from the Plantation.” The movie came about in 2014 when, the director made a research presentation at his office as a speech and one year later he used that speech as an opening monologue for a play staged by Nirvana Humanitarian Foundation INC USA.
While performing the monologue both in NYC and Toronto, Sewnarine noticed tears in the eyes of the audience as they related to the story. After the production, many asked if he can record the monolog and post it up to YouTube.
While it caught his ears, it did not satisfy his artistic desire. He had been acting since 1977 and to slap together a YouTube video with stock footage from the internet was not sounding good to him. As such, he committed to making a movie.
He began writing the script in 2016 and the scenes were shot it in 2017. The scenes were shot in Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo. In one of the scenes, the village of India was built from scratch in Perseverance Estate on the Essequibo coast.
The logie and slave ship were also built at Bola Sawmill in Hubu. The primary reason for this production is to celebrate/commemorate the 180th anniversary of the arrival of Indians in Guyana. Because of that intention, the movie focuses on the first batch of Indians only. There are many other elements of the Indian history in Guyana, but many of those elements happened later in the saga.
Plot
The movie is centered around a Guyanese American young lady who returns home to visit her grandfather ; the story unfolds from there . The cast of the film is primarily young people of all ethnicities.
“The young ones are the ones who are responding in a positive manner. They are inspired. Some of these traditions are family traits that came down and when they came in the 1800 they were coming with the caste system and they (Colonial Masters) selected the workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is because these were agriculture workers and the British selected the agriculture workers to plant sugar cane,” he said.
“Echos from the plantation”- a movie that portrays the livelihood on Indians on the Sugar Plantation was released on Saturday at the Nirvana Humanitarian Foundation at Metem-Mere-Zorg, West Coast Demerara for the commemoration 180th Anniversary of the arrival of East Indians to Guyana. (Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)
