Below is an excerpt of the Pro Vice-Chancellor’s address.

“The purpose of a film programme should be to facilitate potential film-makers to make films. If we fail to grow, create and nurture film-makers here, then the film programme at UWI will have failed in both theory and practice. I will do whatever I have to, to see to it, that our UWI film programme succeeds and I would appreciate the support of all to make that possible. What this means is that we should create a culture in which the exam in final year is the production of a film. One of the roles of teachers should therefore be to stimulate creativity as well as productivity. Because this is a new programme, we have such an opportunity and we must not shirk from the responsibility of seizing such an opportunity and producing fruits.

While the film-makers we turn out should understand how the film industry works and where they fit in the existing scheme of things, and while they need to appreciate what it takes to achieve professional success we must also emphasise that what our students need to focus on, what will take them and us to the places that we want to go, is creative success. Professional success might mean a job and money. Creative success could mean making a breakthrough — making a difference in a medium that can have explosive impact.

We must focus here at UWI, on having students do the films that engage them creatively. While we should ensure that they master the basics — the skills and techniques of film-making, we must give them the creative space to apply the basics, in ways that we might not have conceived and to do things that have not been done before.

We want our students to know how to make films and to see film-making as fulfilling their creative destiny. Our job is not to prepare them to make a living. Our job is to teach them to make film and to inject in them a burning desire to make film. If they choose to make a living it must be their conscious choice. That must be the ethos of UWI’s programme on film and film production.

If we are clear on these principles from the beginning; if we embrace this philosophy, then we have a chance of succeeding and succeed we must in this enterprise which I view as the beginning of the creation of a vibrant film industry in the region. We can do what has never been done and we must dare to do what others might not do, we must create space and expand scope and let our creative genius engage the world with both freshness of content and invention in form.

The fact that we expect creativity from our film students and the fact that we want to facilitate the emergence of creative genius in our students must not mean that we sacrifice discipline and promote a dilettante culture among our students.

If we do not treat writing or film-making or creative work with a high degree of serious respect, then we are simply buying into the mythology of artists as flaky, marginal and ultimately disposable members of our society.

Therefore our film programme must be managed within a framework of discipline and responsibility where self-discipline is recognised as a virtue and responsibility as an obligation to be fulfilled. This will help us to build a platform on which the artist will, not only be appreciated, but respected; and where self respect, will not be sacrificed for some mythical notion of the artist as dilettante.

Artists are often a wandering breed. But not all who wander need be lost.”