“This is a newspaper inspired film,” said Escayg, who was born and bred in Trinidad but now lives in LA and has been following the growing crime trend online. “I had some friends who grew up with me who told me horror stories and that’s when things were bad so I could only imagine what’s it like now,” he said, making it clear all his films will be about making political statements to shake many of us out of the bubble we live in. “I think we taking crime too lightly in Trinidad and everybody glorifying crime, focusing on those who don’t want to be in crime but have no choice and they are literally dying in front of us and we not doing anything about it.” Escayg said Fish, which has a totally local cast, was an experiment in subtitles in English, which is not often done.  He  hailed it a success as foreign audiences have found the film riveting enough to read our local dialect translated to standard English. Fish was chosen out of a pool of 15,000 films to be in the semi-finals and Escayg said the head judge called to tell him she was blown away by what he portrayed. People who saw it were also in praise of the local talent whom Escayg had a lot of kudos for, though he lamented the lack of opportunities here for them.

 

It is with these actors in mind that he plans to do more films locally including the feature length version of Fish. “I would like to do the feature with a production studio like Miramax. The model I am looking at is City of God, they have unknown actors and they control the production. The whole Indie film scene is more my speed,” he said. Escayg’s background is in visual effects, animation and CG and he has worked with George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) company on big budget movies such as Transformers, Rango and Night of the Living Dead. Stating that he was burnt out after Transformers, Escayg said he wanted to do his own thing and chose to work on Fish, which had been brewing in his mind for a while. “I started writing Fish in three months, it went through a couple iterations and then came back to what I started with. I finished writing in August last year, shot it in September and finished it in March.” To vote for Fish go to http://www.youtube.com/user/yourfilmfestival?x=player%2F6oknb4V6F6U__en_us