Unfinished Sentences: The Inheritance of Loss
By Georgia Popplewell
Caribbean Beat, March/ April 2019
“Whether a film is “little” or “big” depends less on the subject than on the depth and quality of the themes it explores. Unfinished Sentences is about a literary figure who deserved to be better known. It’s about how human beings are shaped by place and circumstance and race and history.
“But it’s also about a special — and difficult — relationship…” Read more…
Unfinished Sentences: A Love Story to a Great West Indian Writer
by Wesley Gibbings
Trinidad Guardian, 29.09.2018
“Mariel Brown’s (auto)biopic on the relationship between herself and her late father, poet/ author/ columnist/ biographer, Wayne Brown, both excels as art that manages to capture nuanced emotion, and as a technically outstanding videographic production…
“The 95-minute feature could so easily have descended into a self-indulgent, mawkishly sentimental personal testimony… In the end, an expertly textured script provides a warm, moving account of a tumultuous relationship between a father and his daughter.”
Unfinished Sentences, unstarted script
by BC Pires
Trinidad Newsday
“MARIEL BROWN’S film Unfinished Sentences was begun as a documentary about her father, the late Wayne Brown, one of Trinidad’s most influential newspaper writers, a public figure and a fitting subject for biography in any form.
“As the film develops, though, its focus changes before the eyes of the viewer. A documentary somehow becomes a memoir and a purportedly subjective portrait of a writer actually becomes a deeply personal map of a film-maker’s uneasy voyage into the creative mind of her greatest artistic influence, and out of the mental doldrums in which her father’s death had left her.” Read more…
Poet’s words dazzle in daughter’s new film
by Andre Bagoo
Pleasure Blog
“FATHER-daughter relations, the politics of being an artist, and poetry of breath-taking power converge in Unfinished Sentences, Mariel Brown’s moving new work about her late father, the acclaimed poet, writer and newspaper columnist Wayne Brown.” Read more…
Memories playback like movies: a new personal documentary from Trinidad
by Jaie Laplante
Director of Programming, Miami Film Festival
‘In further creating the sensation of how memories work, a significant amount of Brown’s material is layered and super-imposed upon other visuals, creating a sense of the dense thorniness and complexity of how the mind seeks to reclaim and recast the past into the present. The results are mesmerizing and deeply moving. Brown is a born filmmaker, with an impressive eye and a deep sense of how to connect the intimate to the universal.’ Read more…
Mariel Brown’s ‘Unfinished Sentences’ Is Ode to Family, Love and Loss
by Anna Maria de la Fuente, Variety
‘Grief is a strange beast. When “Unfinished Sentences” helmer Mariel Brown’s father died in 2009, she was afflicted with a psychosomatic hearing problem and plunged into a deep depression. A celebrated Caribbean writer-poet, her father Wayne Brown succumbed to lung cancer not long after he was diagnosed.’ Read more…
Unfinished Sentences heads to Panama
by Peter Ray Blood, Trinidad and Tobago Guardian
‘The Trinidad filmmaker has been accepted to the IFF Panama’s Works in Progress section called Primera Mirada (First Look), with Unfinished Sentences.
This achievement is not just a milestone in Brown’s career but it is a further demonstration of the export potential for T&T films, not to mention an enhancement of the potential for the sales and distribution of locally made films.’ Read more…
Panama Festival unveils centerpiece 2017 Primera Mirada slate
by Martin Dale, Variety
‘The third edition of the Panama Film Festival’s Primera Mirada pix-in-post sidebar has selected four films – from the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Panama and Puerto Rico- from a total of 48 films submitted from the Central America and the Caribbean…
‘Trinidad and Tobago filmmaker Mariel Brown will screen project “Unfinished Sentences,” a highly personal picture about a daughter coming to terms with the death of her father.’ Read more…
Inaugural Ventana Caribe kicks off in Buenos Aires
by Jeremy Kay, Screen Daily
“Rounding out the session was the only documentary of the group, director-producer Mariel Brown’s Unfinished Sentences from Trinidad & Tobago… The film uses reconstruction and readings from Brown’s late father, the celebrated Caribbean poet Wayne Brown, as she seeks to reconnect with him.” Read more…
Ventana Caribe at Ventana Sur
by Emilio Mayorga, Variety
“Mariel Brown and Fernanda Rossi at Trinidad and Tobago’s Savant Media produce a third entry in the Caribbean event: Brown’s “Unfinished Sentences,” a documentary and tribute to the helmer’s father, the well-known Caribbean poet, columnist and fiction writer Wayne Vincent Brown (“On The Coast”), who died in 2009.” Read more….
A Tribute to Love, Literature
by Janine Charles-Farray (The Guardian)
When loved ones die, unfinished business can linger and haunt those who remain with words left unsaid. T&T filmmaker Mariel Brown has chosen to find catharsis and pay tribute through audio-visual expression in her upcoming documentary. The feature-length film, Unfinished Sentences is based on the life and work of her late father, poet, author and Caribbean literary icon Wayne Brown. Read more…
