Hairouna Film Festival goes big for 2025

by Christina K. Smith

The Hairouna Film Festival (HFF) has marked off 2025 as a history-making year following the largest attendance at its local Vincy Film Night.

The reach of the festival has stretched significantly for its sixth year with scores turning out to the Calliaqua Playing Field on March 22, to view films produced by local film makers.

Festival Director, Aiko Roudette, in a post screening interview, described the event as “spectacular” with attendance numbers exceeding 200.

“We’ve had the biggest turn out that we ever had at any of our events. It’s such a heart warming thing to see so many people come out to support local film making.”

The films screened over the weekend included narrative shorts and documentaries on a range of topics such as African storytelling, youth unemployment, grief, heritage, and also religion. Film makers who screened at the Vincy Night were Hayden Billingy, Javed DaSouza, Dynamite, Franciska Eliassen, Fabian Guerra, Sean Roache, Aiko Roudette, Vonnie Roudette, Jemmel Williams, and Christina K. Smith.

In explaining her motivation for mounting the festival back in 2019, Roudette said she believes in the “value of Caribbean and Vincentian stories and story-telling”.

“Film is not just for America and Europe. It is something we can access as Vincentians and Caribbean people and it is a powerful tool … for preserving our cultural heritage. There are a lot of socio-economic benefits to developing a local film industry as it is an expanding market. There are a lot of employment opportunities especially for youth who are naturally attracted to creative industries,” Roudette pointed out.

Although the Vincy Night has been the highlight of the festival which is scheduled to come to a close on Saturday, March 29, HFF has also succeeded in expanding the reach of the festival, hosting Bruno Mourral, the director of Kidnapping Inc. the Oscar nominated comedy thriller.

In a post-screening question and answer session on March 21, Mourral spoke to a local audience about the challenges he faced during the production of the movie which included two members of the crew being kidnapped, lack of funding, and also external events, particularly the assassination of the Haitian President, Jovenel Moïse back in 2021.

Mourral persevered, and was able to eventually complete production after numerous hiccups. He shared his insights in a workshop on March 22, along with one of the movie’s lead actors, Marcus Boereau, attended by local producers and actors.

Over the last week, the HFF team has been travelling throughout the Grenadines to screen films in Union Island and Canouan- a first time initiative for the festival.

Saturday’s event will see the screening of two French short films, ‘Storm in Regina’ and ‘The Genie’ and the feature-length film ‘BOCA CHICA’ out of the Dominican Republic.