You’ve seen him jump from channel to channel with his TV show Crime Watch. You’ve seen him take tips from the public and help solve crimes. You’ve seen him cry and rant. But who is Ian Alleyne?
That is one of the things you can discover with the theatrical premiere of the 47-minute documentary on Alleyne, Party Done, by filmmaker Ian Harnarine.
“The story is focusing on how he makes the controversial show Crime Watch. It’s a portrait of him as well. Hopefully, we understand why he does the things he does and hopefully, we see him in a different light.”
Born in Toronto, Harnarine is the child of two Trinidadian parents who still has close ties to his family in TT.
He explained that in May 2008, his grandfather was murdered in Tabaquite. He and his family came to TT for the funeral and felt as if the police did not care and the community was not willing to help the police.
“Up to this day, the crime is still unsolved so my family never got any justice. That really put what was happening in Trinidad with respect to crime on my mind. I kept following up with what was happening.”
Harnarine started to hear about Alleyne and his TV show around 2010.
“He was doing things a lot of people wished they could do themselves or they were glad someone was doing. He’s naming names, calling people out, trying to make a difference. That’s initially what I found to be really interesting.”
He started to watch clips of Crime Watch on YouTube and Facebook in 2014 and then Alleyne started going live. He said it connected the diaspora with what was happening back in TT and he watched it every weekday.
He described the show as multi-faceted and said there was no questioning Alleyne’s desire to make things in TT better.
“For better or worse, a large part of the country still really trusts him as opposed to the authorities. He gives out his phone numbers on air and you can call and he will answer. I think that’s really interesting. He walks his talk.”
[caption id="attachment_944458" align="alignnone" width="960"] Ian Alleyne on the set of Crime Watch. -[/caption]
He said people either love or hate Alleyne which piqued his interest as a filmmaker, so he started planning the film in 2015 but could not get in touch with Alleyne.
Finally, in 2019, he booked a flight to TT, went straight to the Crime Watch studio and spoke to Alleyne about the documentary after the show. Alleyne agreed to do it so Harnarine’s cinematographer flew to TT the next day and they started filming for several months until January 2020.
Although Party Done world premiered at the 2021 Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami and was screened at the TT Film Festival, Harnarine is very excited about the film’s first theatrical release.
“The film festivals are wonderful because you get a lot of excitement around it but at the end of the day you’re only screening it for a couple of days at a certain time or people will miss it.
“Whereas this is an opportunity to make it far more accessible to a larger audience and get more people to actually see it
