Michael Gilkes. In Memoriam

We read in Stabroek News and the Guyana Chronicle about the death of the playwright, poet, scholar and filmmaker Michael Gilkes (1933-2020) because of complications associated with COVID-19.

In 1991 he directed and wrote a hybrid 45-minute documentary-fiction piece mixing facts from Jean Rhys's biography and dramatization of fragments from Wide Sargasso Sea:  Sargasso! A Caribbean Love Story (a fragment can be seen here). In Michael Gilkes's own words:

'It was much more than a pilot programme: it was an exercise in community relations, in social and cultural integration, in regional communications, in personal discipline and human relationships...in the creating of a Caribbean film, drawn from a Caribbean work that would speak to Caribbean people about the complex privilege of being a Caribbean person' ( Inside the People TV in Reflections 1991, a UNESCO publication)