Interview
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Husband and wife team, Howard and Mitzi Allen, founded HAMA Productions in 1992 and have been called the most prolific filmmakers in the Eastern Caribbean. Their debut movie, The Sweetest Mango, was the region’s first indigenous feature-length film. Their second and third movies, No Seed, a political drama, and Diablesse, based on Caribbean folklore, were released in 2002 and 2005 respectively. Their 2011 supernatural thriller, The Skin, was screened to great success at film festivals in Toronto, Los Angeles, the UK, Washington, Trinidad & Tobago and Belize. They are due to release their fifth film, Deep Blue, next year. HAMA has also produced a wide variety of television programmes, including the widely distributed drama series Paradise View as well as many documentaries. Howard and Mitzi found the time in their busy postproduction schedule to sit down with The Citizen and talk about their last 30 years as HAMAFilms.
How did HAMA Films come about? Mitzi: Our first movie from 2000, The Sweetest Mango, is the story of how we met and fell in love. Thirty years ago, I returned to Antigua & Barbuda after working in Toronto as a broadcast journalist. I met Howard at CTV/The Superchannel where we began together. When we started dating, he told me that he had always wanted to have his own company and had created the name HAMA as a company name. I thought it was our names combined, so I asked him what it stood for thinking I was being coy - and he told me “Howard and Maxwell Allen” – Maxwell being his brother! However, it did become Howard and Mitzi in the end! Filmmaking was always Howard’s dream, and I had always dreamt of being an actress. Howard: One day, Mitzi was reading some of her old journals, and she remembered that I had given her a mango as a gift when we first met. And that is how the idea for The Sweetest Mango as a screenplay came about. With all the excitement leading up to the year 2000, I wanted The Sweetest Mango to be a millennium project – to take Antigua & Barbuda into the new era. Although there had been a few films made previously in the 1970s and 1980s, they weren’t feature films and I wanted to take filmmaking to a new level. What are you working on now? M: We’ve just wrapped Deep Blue and are now in post-production. Our original idea was to have it completed in time for the COP26 conference
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