AS TOLD TO BC PIRES

My name is Akkel Lee Charles and I made Get Free, which BC Pires says is the best horror movie ever shot in Trinidad.

I gave myself the middle name "Lee." After two of my biggest influences, Spike Lee, the filmmaker, and Stan Lee, of Marvel Comics.

I lived three years in Tobago, because my mom is from there, but everything other than that was in the community of Laventille. Morvant, St Paul Street and Upper Wharton Street. I say the “community” of Laventille because people think we’re so disbanded. Laventille has the cuss-outs the bacchanal, the whatever, but we live so close to each other, and everybody know everybody (so) you have to be family-oriented. It easy to know when somebody is

not from the area.

People automatically say, “You could at least meet we by the cathedral because we don’t want to come up in (Laventille!)” They’s make it seem like it have a special gunman and a special criminal waiting for you specifically as you enter the area to take your lights.

But Laventille is a regular place with regular human beings. Normal things happen in normal life just like in any other area. I appreciate where I from, both the good and the bad.

It has its faults.

If BC Pires says Jeffrey Alleyne’s Welcome to Warlock shows youths running up and down the Hill shooting at one another, I say he was presenting a reality a lot of people know.

But Laventille (has) a lot of personalities (not just loudmouths). Wide personalities, loud, soft, medium.

I don’t draw “guns-guns-guns-guns” from Laventille. I would pull for characters and characterisation (in films). I wouldn’t run with the cliche.

I’m the eldest of three sisters, one brother.

I want to have a family down the line but, if I could have one now, I’d take it now. They say, “When children come, money does come after.”

I wouldn’t mind if I could enter some small goal seven-a-side competitions now.

But let we just say I haven’t found any mother material as yet.

I was raised in a Seventh Day Adventist home. But not a very strict one. We would end the Sabbath with Family Night: watch a movie and eat a lot of snacks.

My grandmother had

boxes of Nigerian movies. I would sit down and watch four-parts with her. Morning to night, every single day.

My grandmother aways tell me, “If is one thing about God, He’s slow, but He’s sure.” So, yes, I believe in a powerful God capable of intervention in human affairs. I pray.

But I never question people who don’t.

Everybody has their own experiences. I had a girl in my life who never believed in God and it was never really anything.

The only thing I might change about how our parents raised us is that we grew up vegetarian.

Now we grown, is not as before. We don’t have to hide to eat (KFC).

Primary school was Morvant Government, Scarborough Methodist. Then Woodbrook Secondary, finished at Signal Hill.

My performing arts teacher told me I was really good. But I would run and hide at lunchtime.

One day, just walking unaware, thinking she had probably given up the chase,