THE ENIGMA OF HAROLD SONNY LADOO

Third Horizon is honored to present the world premiere of The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, the latest film by Trinidad-born, Toronto-based artist and previous THFF filmmaker, Richard Fung. 

Born in Trinidad in 1945, Harold Sonny Ladoo migrated to Canada as a young man with the fierce ambition of becoming a writer. In 1972 he published his first novel, No Pain Like This Body—a vivid and poetic, yet devastating depiction of life during Indian indentureship in Trinidad, and a now-recognised classic of Caribbean literature. Ladoo’s second novel, Yesterdays, one of the queerest works of Caribbean fiction, was published in 1974. The same year Ladoo’s battered body was found by a roadside in Trinidad. He was 28. Beyond his literary achievements, Ladoo’s life and death remain mysterious, in part because he kept reinventing his biography.

In The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo Richard Fung draws on a 20-year-old archive of video interviews by Trinidadian filmmaker Christopher Laird, a founder of the pioneering Trinidadian film and television production company, Banyan. Laird spoke with Ladoo’s family, Trinidad intimates, and members of the Canadian literary scene who helped advance Ladoo’s career in Toronto. Filmed in Trinidad and Toronto, the film attempts to piece together the puzzle of Ladoo’s complex, often tumultuous life, and  his tragic death. Caribbean and Canadian-Caribbean authors Shani Mootoo, Kevin Jared Hosein, Andil Gosine, Ramabai Espinet, and David Chariandy voice Ladoo’s groundbreaking fiction, alongside animated drawings by Trinidadian artist Adam Williams.

*This film is a world premiere.

A Q+A with Richard Fung will follow the screening.