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Wishing For Wings
Big Drum Nation invites readers in the New York metropolitan area and beyond to attend the premiere of Kim Johnson’s Wishing For Wings (W4W) at the Festival of Cinema NYC on August 11 at 12.30 pm. The screening is at Regal UA Midway Theatre, 108-22 Queens Blvd, Forest Hills, NY. Click HERE for tickets to the August 11 (Thursday) screening.
The film is a moving documentary on the young convicts in the juvenile prison in Trinidad known as the Youth Training Centre (YTC). The film shows the violence these boys have endured and visited on others and their long climb to redemption through self-reflection and literature. Johnson’s film has been nominated for Best Documentary at the Festival.
Kim Johnson is a writer and filmmaker who started as a journalist and carried his investigations into documentary filmmaking, telling the stories of ordinary people who did extraordinary things. He has written the definitive book on pan, The Illustrated Story of Pan (2021); on the early history of Trinidad (The Fragrance of Gold); and on the Chinese in T&T (Descendants of the Dragon.)
Dr. Johnson received one of the Caribbean’s most prestigious awards for his work, the Anthony N. Sabga Award for Caribbean Excellence in the Arts & Letters. However, Johnson is no stranger to notable awards as in filmmaking, his docu-drama PAN! Our Music Odyssey won several prizes at film festivals; Re-Percussions: Our African Odyssey (TTFF best documentary, 2015); and March of the Mokos (2018), which won the Caribbean Tales award in Toronto.
Now in Wishing For Wings, having been given unprecedented access to the prison and its inmates, he turned his camera to the boys behind bars, recording heartbreaking, candid interviews with prisoners and guards and their literature teacher, the shy, traumatized librarian, Debbie Jacob.
Click HERE for tickets to the Thursday, August 11 screening at the Festival of Cinema NYC, and contact the author at illustratedpan@gmail.com for information on The Illustrated Story of Pan.