Aiko gets her message across through film

Just like a song, a movie is a powerful tool that can be used to get a message across.

And, documentary filmmaker Aiko Roudette is using the tool of film, to tell not only her own unique stories, but local stories, Caribbean stories and stories of persons who may not have voices of their own.  

Aiko, the sister of singer Marlon Roudette and daughter of artist Vonnie Roudette, has a Master’s degree in media studies, with a focus on documentary film, and she has been using her skills to benefit not only herself, but others as well and is hoping for a renaissance in the region.

“It is an interesting moment for Caribbean film right now, because there is a lot of enthusiasm and I think generally we have a lot of promise to be able to push our work to an international standard, so that is really something that I want to be a part of,” Aiko told SEARCHLIGHT during a recent interview.

Her first film made was part of her thesis and is about her home in St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) and her family’s experience with crime and how they responded to that experience. Her film has been shown in St Kitts, Barbados, SVG, Trinidad, Grenada, London and New York.

Dedicated to her craft, Aiko, a graduate of Bard College in upstate New York, does mainly freelance work and has many clients worldwide. She is a specialist in documentary work and does commercial documentaries, profile pieces, portrait pieces, long and short documentaries and has done one feature length documentary and has more in the making.

She has done pieces on the local petroglyphs, about growing up in SVG, about love and witchcraft and freelance work on several humanitarian projects worldwide.  

Aiko has just completed four pieces on four Vincentian artistes of which she says she is proud. She is hoping to have them released soon.

The young filmmaker recently shot a short film at Her Majesty’s Prison, based on her mother’s rehabilitation work there, and has also worked with the Caribbean Film Academy.

“This is a really amazing company that is producing a bunch of different films from the Caribbean every year,” said Aiko, who was recently in Dominica and St Kitts, where she did short films.

And, having worked with several young writers from the Caribbean, Aiko is hopeful that the Caribbean film scene will explode in a way that our culture and history will remain alive through film.

“We have a lot of oral history; we tell a lot of stories, like jumbie (ghost) stories and storytelling is really integral to our culture and history,” said Aiko, who thinks that film making plays a very strong role as a modern form of the storytelling tradition.

“it is also a very powerful artform with mass communicable abilities; hundreds, thousands of people can watch the same film at the same time,” Aiko says, adding that she wants to make a movie locally and is collaborating with several persons to make this happen.

Aiko was born in England and moved to SVG with her mother and brother when she was four. She attended the Windsor Primary School and the Sugar Mill Academy and spent her secondary school life at the St Joseph’s Convent Marriaqua (SJCM).

After the SJCM, Aiko went on to a school in Wales for two years, came back to SVG and worked and travelled with her mom, after which she got a scholarship to study film in New York. Her New York lifestyle has seen her work very hard to build her career, but she still sees SVG as her home.

“It is a very hard thing to build a career for yourself freelancing when you are a student in New York, so I had to do a lot of work. I had to work for free, on the grind, constantly doing things with friends, in school. Just anything to try and develop skills and to kind of get better and better at the craft,” Aiko told SEARCHLIGHT, adding that she has gradually built up clients, including a social research company that allowed her to do a project for the United Kingdom (UK) government and UNICEF. This project took her to Uganda.

Aiko does not keep her knowledge and experience to herself. She has taught about film making at local workshops and done film education classes in underprivileged communities in New York. She has also worked on social justice projects and has volunteered extensively and worked with organizations like Human Rights Watch and the Jewish Voices for Peace.

Charlie Wilson and Questlove are among the musicians she has worked with.(LC)