‘Backlash’ fools passers-by

In the scene was a jeep on its side and an old car, both on fire, an ambulance with attendants, a fire truck and firemen armed with hoses and a couple of police vehicles.

Some members of the crew had hearty laughs by the remarks of the onlookers especially that of one elderly gentleman who remarked, "ah tell them those roll-on roll-off fire vehicles eh good." Another man asked, "Who dead?"

The film itself is called Backlash. It is an action/adventure film and it’s a story of CIA agent Skye Gold who is on the run for her life while she is on vacation in Trinidad for Carnival. She tries to survive attempts on her life and at the same time figure out who killed her boyfriend, another CIA agent. For the Carnival scene the producers are going to recreate the festival with music band Xtatik on a truck with approximately 200 people revelling around it.

The lead cast is a mixed one with five of them from Los Angeles. These include lead actress Danielle Burgio (Skye) who is best known as the stunt double for Trinity in the movie Matrix. This is her debut movie. Her supporting actress is Lauren Kim (Hua) with Kevin Levrone (Turk) as lead actor, who acted with Vin Diesel in Too Fast Too Furious. He was expected in Trinidad last evening and will join the filming crew from today.

Locals Errol Roberts, Glendon Nawrang and Gabrielle Walcott are in supporting roles.

Producer G Anthony Joseph, whose last Trinidad-based film was Men of Grey II, is back with fellow producer Cauri Jaye for this production. They were both born in Trinidad but now work out of Hollywood with Tritan North Star Entertainment.

The film is directed by David Chameides who worked on television shows ER, Third Watch and West Wing, and director of photography is Dave Harp, who also did television work on Ally Mc Beal. However Joseph said 80 - 85 percent of the cast are locals.

And what does this production mean for Trinidad? Jaye said, "We have had a lot of films with international distribution and each year we tried to bring them in Trinidad we ended up in Orlando, USA, because the environment wasn’t ready.

This time, thanks to TIDCO and the support of the protective services, we’ve finally managed to bring one film home. And because we’ve raised the finance locally, the importance of that is when the profits of this film come back, it will come back to Trinidad.

The filming continues for the next three weeks in and around Port-of-Spain, Lady Young Road, North Coast Road heading to Maracas, Maraval and Chaguaramas.