Young Saint Lucian filmmakers tell the climate story through people

A weekend on an old sugar estate in the south of Saint Lucia may have changed how a generation of island filmmakers talks about the climate. Six young creatives spent 17 to 19 October at Balenbouche Estate near Choiseul for Listwa Latè-a, a residency whose name translates from Kwéyòl as Earth Stories, and came away with short films now being finished for online screenings in the months ahead.

As reported by St. Lucia Times, the programme was run by the Listwa Collective with backing from the Caribbean Culture Fund, and its teaching was led by Michael Lees, an award-winning documentary maker from Dominica. The subject was climate and environmental injustice, but the organisers were determined to keep statistics and scientific jargon out of the frame.

Amanie Mathurin, the collective's founder and creative director, argued that climate debate too often strips away the human element. Living in the Caribbean means facing vulnerabilities particular to the region, she said, and the stories worth telling are the ones grounded in history, community and people rather than data. Lees's own message to his students was similar: there are creative ways to tell these stories, and the island's filmmakers should be looking for them.

The six participants worked in pairs and each pairing began a short film during the weekend. Those projects are still in production, and the collective expects to show them in virtual screenings. The effect on the individuals was immediate. Joel Paul said he arrived at Balenbouche one kind of filmmaker and left a more confident one, with a clearer sense of the stories he wants to tell. Elon Sonny said the workshop made him more deliberate in his storytelling, and Jeremie Louis came away with a new appetite for documentary work.

The estate itself is a fitting classroom. Balenbouche is an eighteenth-century plantation turned guesthouse, heritage site and organic farm, where visitors can walk the old sugar mill ruins and gardens, and it doubles as proof of the kind of layered, history-heavy landscape the residency wants on screen. Travellers drawn by that mix of heritage and coast will find it pairs well with the wider range of things to do in St Lucia, from estate visits to forest walks.

The teaching did not stop at the estate gates. Lees screened his documentary Uncivilised at the Vieux Fort Arts and Entertainment Centre and at the University of the West Indies Global Campus, then took the film to students at Sir Arthur Lewis Community College and to the A-Level department of Vieux Fort Comprehensive Secondary School, where clips were followed by question-and-answer sessions.

That reach matters because the island's younger generation already gets its news and stories online rather than in print, with YouTube, TikTok and Instagram carrying a growing share of local creative work. A residency that hands cameras to people in their twenties and tells them to film their own communities is betting on exactly that shift.

For visitors, the story is a reminder that the island's creative scene runs well beyond the beach. Independent travellers booking holidays to St Lucia in the coming season can build an itinerary around the south's quieter cultural side: the Choiseul crafts tradition, the estate trails, and the small guesthouses and villas in St Lucia that sit far from the resort strips. Balenbouche welcomes day visitors to its ruins and gardens, though arrangements should be confirmed in advance.

Weather is the practical note for anyone timing a trip around outdoor filming locations or estate walks. The drier months between December and April are generally considered the best time to visit St Lucia, and the same window suits hiking in St Lucia's interior, where the plantation landscapes and rainforest trails that inspired these young filmmakers are at their most accessible.

What happens next is in the participants' hands. The short films are due to be completed and screened online, and if the residency becomes a repeat event, Saint Lucia may find it has produced a small cohort of documentarians whose view of the climate crisis starts not with graphs but with grandparents, villages and the ground beneath them.

For now, the measure of the weekend is the one Paul described: six filmmakers left Balenbouche surer of their craft and of the stories only they can tell, and an audience somewhere online will soon see the result.