Faisal Lutchmedial

Welcome to Trinidad

A one-hour dramatic series about half brothers slowly uncovering mysteries buried deep in their father’s past.

Synopsis

Not long after landing in Trinidad & Tobago, the younger brother, Nermal, begins having nightmares about eerie figures crawling out of the mud of swamps and a blue devil stalking him through a palm forest. The dreams become more vivid and creep into his waking life, melding fantasy and reality.

The older brother, Ramdai, is only there to take control of their late uncle’s rum distillery. He is all business and resents his brother’s lack of ambition to do anything other than excess in the pleasures of alcohol, drugs, and women. As Nermal’s madness escalates though, Ramdai begins to help him dig deeper into their history and discover secrets their father never wanted them to know.

The series, Welcome to Trinidad, follows this family at war with itself, and as the intrigue
develops, it pits ideas of colonialism and globalism against the traditional Trinidadian
folklore of the Carnival and the magic realism surrounding it.

Biography

Faisal Lutchmedial is a Canadian filmmaker of both East and West Indian descent. His work has explored his mixed cultural background beginning with My Cultural Divide (2006, 75 mins), which opened at the Montreal World Film Festival and went on to play to excellent reviews worldwide. This unique documentary explores heritage, culture, and the 2nd generation immigrant experience — all while investigating sweatshop labour in his mother’s native Bangladesh.

Lutchmedial then moved toward fiction by writing, directing and acting in the short Useless Things (2009, 16 mins), a film about a 2nd generation Indian immigrant dealing with his parents death and a loss of history. The script had already won the WGC English Script Prize at the Festival Nouveau Cinema Montreal and has since played in several film festivals. More recently, Lutchmedial completed the short fiction Mr. Crab (2011, 9 mins), a story about a little boy’s escape into fantasy while trying to understand his angry West Indian father.

Two major projects possibly lay in the horizon for Lutchmedial, one being the feature drama Path of Light, which he wrote as a companion piece to Useless Things. The second is the television series he is developing at this year’s incubator, Welcome to Trinidad.

Lutchmedial.ca