Virgo ... has directed episodes of HBO's 'The Wire' and Showtime's 'The L Word' and 'Soul Food'. - Contributed
Because he was born here, Jamaica could conceivably claim Clement Virgo as its most-awarded film-maker. But he has been living in Canada since he was 11 years old and learnt his craft there, and biographies generally list him as one of the top Canadian film-makers.
Still, Virgo, who was born in Montego Bay in 1966, has not forgotten his childhood here and a film about that period is one of the many inchoate projects occupying his mind. He was in Jamaica recently (until Ash Wednesday, when he departed) to check out the feasibility of making such a film and, more generally, to get acquainted with Jamaica's fledgling film industry.
Exploring jamaica
"To someone looking from the outside, it looks like primarily a service industry," he said. "So if someone [in the film business] wants to come to Jamaica, they might get some hotel rooms or something."
Virgo was speaking to Principal Burchell Duhaney and a group of drama school lecturers at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts (EMC) last Tuesday.
Another film Virgo said he was planning to make is on another Jamaican-Canadian, the once famous and now disgraced sprinter Ben Johnson.
"I want to redeem him in a way, to say that he wasn't the only one using drugs," Virgo told The Gleaner.
Performances at the olympics
Chuckling, he added, "I must admit at the Olympic Games I didn't celebrate right away when Usain Bolt won. I held my breath, just in case (Bolt tested positive for drug use). I didn't celebrate until they were playing the Jamaican national anthem and he was on the podium."
Virgo told the group that he knew several film-makers in Canada who had Caribbean connections and who would want to show their film in Jamaica and actually do some work here.
"We met with the Jamaican High Commissioner in Toronto two months ago," he said.
At the meeting was a young film-maker who had wanted to shoot part of his film in Jamaica, Virgo said, "but because he couldn't get any Government incentive to come to Jamaica to do the work, he shot it on a lake up there to look like Jamaica".
Also in the room, Virgo continued, was another film-maker who wanted to make a film about deportees sent back to Jamaica. "And there're similar groups in New York and London who have very strong connections to where they come from (in the Caribbean)."
Pointing out that the Canadian provinces competed with each other in offering incentives to filmmakers, he said that if Jamaica also offered attractive incentives, filmmakers with Caribbean roots would be happy to come here to work. One of the things he wanted to find out, he admitted, was precisely what incentives Jamaica did offer.
Virgo promised to make contact with some of the Caribbean film practitioners in Canada and try to arrange a showing of their films here.
He was told that while play-writing (for the stage) has been taught for many years at the drama school, screenwriting was not. However, recently the School of Drama was presented with a television scriptwriting outline for consideration as a course. (The EMC principal also stated recently that there were plans to establish a film school at the college.)
Multiple careers
Virgo told the gathering that he had two careers, one as a writer/producer/director of films and the other as a television director. His latest feature film, Poor Boy's Game (starring Danny Glover and Rossif Sutherland, son of film actor Donald Sutherland) had its world premiere in 2007 at the Berlin Film Festival. That year, it won Best Film and Audience Choice awards at the Atlantic Film Festival and Calgary International Film Festival.
Virgo's sexy Lie With Me (based on a book by his wife, Tamara Faith Berger), caused gasps and much comment at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival.
Rude, his first feature film, which he wrote, directed and produced, was screened at a Cannes Film Festival and a Sundance Film Festival, won a Genie award (Canada's equivalent of the Oscars) for Best Director, and has earned three Best Film citations.
His second dramatic feature, Love Come Down, premiered at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, was nominated for nine Genie awards and won three. It won top prizes at the Urbanworld, Jamerican and Acapulco Festivals and Best Film prize at the London, UK, Black Filmmakers International Film festival.
The Planet of Junior Brown, Virgo's 1997 feature for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, received a day-time Emmy nomination. It went on to win several prizes, including the grand prize at the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York City, and the Silver Nymph Award for Most Innovative Screenwriting at the 1998 Monte Carlo Television Festival.
Virgo has directed many episodes of well known television series like HBO's The Wire and Showtime's The L Word and Soul Food. He is about to wrap up production for a new NBC/CTV television series, The Listener, for which he is both director and executive producer.
Virgo told The Gleaner that he studied film-making at, among other places, a school in Toronto set up by the Oscar-winning director Norman Jewison (director of In the Heat of the Night, with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, and The Hurricane with Denzel Washington).
It was because of the school's programmme which funds new filmmakers, he said, that he was able to make Rude. Its positive reception at the Cannes Film Festival "jump-started" his career, he said.
Film-maker Clement Virgo (right) talks his craft with Chris Brownie (left) and Chappy St Juste at Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, UWI, Mona, last Monday. - Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer