Melody Heals the Soul
New York City, New York | Film Short
Musical, Romance
When words drift away, we find alternate ways to communicate love. This film listens. To silence. To Rhythm. To Body. Your support helps tell a story of healing through music, culture, and care, honoring those living with aphasia and the communities that hold them within the Caribbean.
Melody Heals the Soul
New York City, New York | Film Short
Musical, Romance
1 Campaigns |
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Goal: $15,300 for production
When words drift away, we find alternate ways to communicate love. This film listens. To silence. To Rhythm. To Body. Your support helps tell a story of healing through music, culture, and care, honoring those living with aphasia and the communities that hold them within the Caribbean.
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Help Bring Melody Heals the Soul to Life in Nevis
A cinematic Caribbean romantic drama where music becomes medicine and love helps restore a lost voice.
The sea breeze moves through the palms. Steel pan drifts down the road. Somewhere in the distance, laughter rises from a bar near the beach.
But for Nigel Warner, the world has gone quiet.
Once a magnetic young trumpeter with a future as bright as the island sun, Nigel’s life changed after a traumatic accident left him living with aphasia, a communication disorder that has fractured his relationship to language, confidence, and music itself.
Words now arrive broken. Sentences slip away. Even the trumpet he once commanded feels miles from reach.
Then, Melika Braithwaite returns home.
Brilliant, compassionate, and relentless, Melika is a medical student who sees possibility where others see limits. Refusing to let Nigel disappear into silence, she begins experimenting with a new approach: rebuilding speech through melody, rhythm, memory, and the sounds of Nevis itself.
A trumpet note.
A soca bassline.
A phrase carried by waves.
A heartbeat finding tempo again.
As friendship deepens into something tender and unexpected, Nigel and Melika race toward one final test: a public performance during Culturama, the island’s most electric celebration of music, movement, and identity.
If Nigel can find the courage to play again, he may also find his voice.
Melody Heals the Soul is a lush, emotionally rich romantic drama grounded in real science and Caribbean beauty.
This is a story of:
- love after loss
- disability and dignity
- Black tenderness
- resilience through art
- community healing
- reclaiming identity through sound
The film blends intimate character drama with the vibrant energy of island life. It's where color, rhythm, warmth, and memory are everywhere.
It is sensual, hopeful, moving, and cinematic.
Think emotional intimacy, golden sunsets, music in the streets, laughter through pain, and the feeling that life can begin again.
WHY THIS STORY MATTERS
We rarely see stories that center recovery with tenderness.
We rarely see Caribbean people shown in emotional depth beyond cliché.
We rarely see Black love stories rooted in healing instead of trauma.
We rarely see disability narratives filled with joy, dignity, romance, and possibility.
Melody Heals the Soul exists to change that.
Inspired by the real practice of Melodic Intonation Therapy, a treatment that uses melody and rhythm to help people living with aphasia regain speech, this film explores the profound relationship between music and the human spirit.
This story can only be told in Nevis.
Nevis is more than a backdrop. It is the pulse of the film.
The island’s landscape, soundscape, and spirit shape Nigel’s healing journey:
- waves breaking at Pinney’s Beach
- brass and bass drifting through the streets
- lush mountain roads
- warm village humor
- festival color and movement
- ancestral calm and modern rhythm
We will film across authentic local locations including:
- Pinney’s Beach
- Artisan Village
- Hot Springs area
- Golden Rock surroundings
- Village roads and gathering spaces
- Festival-inspired environments
Hot Springs
Pinney's Beach
Artisan Village
It is also home to the director and I. Honoring our heritage, this is cinema rooted in place.
MELODY HEALS THE SOUL is rooted in a belief that has guided me and my work across disciplines: rhythm is not decorative, it is diagnostic. Rhythm reveals what the body carries when language fails. Music is not an accompaniment to healing in this story. It is the pathway. I co-wrote this script with producer Louric Rankine and am directing it in our ancestral homeland of Nevis. We are both Brooklyn-born children of parents from St. Kitts & Nevis, raised inside households where artistry and labor coexisted without contradiction. My father was a welder for NYC Transit Authority, and also the local DJ and neighborhood photographer.
My mother was an NYC Department of Education assistant teacher. She became a certified ASL interpreter, and took up painting and poetry in retirement. The Nevis we know is populated by folks like them, technically skilled, creatively expansive, and spiritually layered. Too often, portrayals of the island flatten that dimensionality into backdrop or luxury fantasy. This film is a homecoming, an insistence on complexity.
While Nevis has recently been spotlighted through Broadway success and reality television tourism, MELODY HEALS THE SOUL bears witness to the fuller spectrum of our humanity. There are working hospitals, young scientists with global ambition, musicians confronting loss, and families negotiating disability with grace.
That is the Nevis we return to. In this story, a trumpet player recovering from traumatic brain injury and Broca’s aphasia confronts the loss of speech through Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT). A hearing impaired child experiences rhythm through vibration and visual cue. A young medical student works to culturally adapt aphasia treatment to the sonic textures of the Caribbean. Their arcs intersect through soca rehearsal, steel pan resonance, waterfalls, and clinical space.
MIT is not presented as abstract protocol. It is tested against the sonic reality of Nevis, Culturama rhythms, and ocean ambience. The film asks what happens when treatment reflects the cadence of the community it serves.
My mother’s ongoing work as an ASL interpreter directly informs the inclusivity woven into this narrative. I came of age watching language move through hands, faces, and bodies. Communication was never singular. That proximity to Deaf culture and signed language sharpened my understanding that access is not accommodation, it is design. Black women medical professionals are not peripheral, they are central innovators and caretakers.
In this film, communication unfolds through humming, signing, breath, tempo, and touch.
Our total production budget is $45,000.
We are proud to share that we have already raised $24,000 through incredible early supporters:
- Nevis Film Commission
- Columbia University School of the Arts Finishing Funds
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
That early support has helped launch pre-production and move this dream toward reality.
Now we are raising the final funds needed to complete production in Nevis and bring the film across the finish line.
Your contribution helps us cover:
- local crew hiring
- cast travel + lodging
- meals during production
- transportation on island
- equipment + sound needs
- art direction + wardrobe
- insurance + logistics
- editing, color, sound mix
- festival launch strategy
Every dollar goes directly on screen.
When you support this film, you are helping:
- amplify Caribbean storytelling
- support local jobs and creatives in Nevis
- champion disability awareness
- fund an independent Black-led production
- launch a globally resonant short film
You are not just donating. You are producing possibility.
TIMELINE
Spring – Early Summer
Casting, rehearsals, logistics, final fundraising
July
Production in Nevis (July 18-22)
Late Summer – Fall
Editing, score, color, sound design
Fall – Winter
Festival submissions + premiere strategy
1. Make a Pledge
Every contribution moves us closer to production.
2. Share the Campaign
Send this page to film lovers, music lovers, Caribbean communities, doctors, educators, and anyone who believes in healing stories.
3. Join Our Village
Independent films are built by community. Become part of ours.
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Pay the Crew
Costs $12,000
Our crew (local and NY-based) is the heartbeat of this film. The hand that shapes light, holds sound, and carry the story forward.
Pay the Cast
Costs $2,800
Actors. Moko Jumbie. Steelpan. Masquerade. Dancing. Their performances gives shape to loss, resilience, and rediscovery.
MIT Device
Costs $500
The MIT device is where science meets sound, where Melika reimagines healing through music. It is not just a prop, but an anchor.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
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Tamika R. Guishard (director) is a first- generation Brooklyn-born filmmaker with roots in St. Kitts and Nevis. Her storytelling draws from African diasporic rhythm, public education, and place- based memory to center communities historically denied authorship. Before completing NYU Graduate Film, she taught middle school in her hometown of East New York, an experience that clarified storytelling as civic responsibility rather than purely artistic pursuit.
Her African dance-driven feature project has been recognized by NYU Purple List, Cannes Screenplay List, and Breaking Through the Lens, with support from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Rooftop Filmmakers Fund, and the inaugural Digital Bolex Women Cinematographers Award. Its proofs of concept screened at Oscar-qualifying festivals and were written, directed, produced, and largely shot by Black women. She has been a fellow with Athena Film Festival’s LA Writers Lab, Residency Unlimited, IFP Week’s No Borders Market, and Black Women Film! Canada at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
Adelphi University’s first Black communications professor and longtime cultural worker, Guishard builds films as living records. She uses rhythm, pedagogy, and ancestry to cultivate appreciation for universal humanity: amplifying marginalized voices to promote vital takeaways for survival and solutions.
Louric Rankine (producer) is a Brooklyn-born filmmaker, first generation from Jamaica and Saint Kitts and Nevis, and creative producer whose work centers on storytelling as a tool for liberation, representation, and transformation. With a passion for film production and international media distribution, Louric’s practice aims to decolonize media strategies and marketing models within the entertainment industry, expanding how intersectional narratives are told, shared, and sustained across cultures. He has been involved in film since high school, participating in programs like BAM, Hook Arts Media, BRIC and Reel Works.
A Posse Foundation Scholar, Louric continues to explore innovative approaches to storytelling that bridge artistic vision with equitable production models. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Producing at Columbia University. Alongside graduate studies, Louric served as a Teaching Artist at Reel Works, mentoring emerging filmmakers in Brooklyn to find their voice through visual media and community-centered storytelling. Previously, Louric has held roles across major media networks and creative organizations, including DISH Media, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and FilmNation Entertainment, building expertise in campaign coordination, post-production operations, and creative asset management.
These experiences have deepened Louric’s understanding of both the artistry and logistics of media production, from content delivery pipelines to global localization strategies. Through each project, whether in the classroom, on set, or in the editing room, Louric Rankine continues to imagine a media landscape that reflects the multiplicity of human experience and the power of film to connect, challenge, and heal.
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
Help Bring Melody Heals the Soul to Life in Nevis
A cinematic Caribbean romantic drama where music becomes medicine and love helps restore a lost voice.
The sea breeze moves through the palms. Steel pan drifts down the road. Somewhere in the distance, laughter rises from a bar near the beach.
But for Nigel Warner, the world has gone quiet.
Once a magnetic young trumpeter with a future as bright as the island sun, Nigel’s life changed after a traumatic accident left him living with aphasia, a communication disorder that has fractured his relationship to language, confidence, and music itself.
Words now arrive broken. Sentences slip away. Even the trumpet he once commanded feels miles from reach.
Then, Melika Braithwaite returns home.
Brilliant, compassionate, and relentless, Melika is a medical student who sees possibility where others see limits. Refusing to let Nigel disappear into silence, she begins experimenting with a new approach: rebuilding speech through melody, rhythm, memory, and the sounds of Nevis itself.
A trumpet note.
A soca bassline.
A phrase carried by waves.
A heartbeat finding tempo again.
As friendship deepens into something tender and unexpected, Nigel and Melika race toward one final test: a public performance during Culturama, the island’s most electric celebration of music, movement, and identity.
If Nigel can find the courage to play again, he may also find his voice.
Melody Heals the Soul is a lush, emotionally rich romantic drama grounded in real science and Caribbean beauty.
This is a story of:
- love after loss
- disability and dignity
- Black tenderness
- resilience through art
- community healing
- reclaiming identity through sound
The film blends intimate character drama with the vibrant energy of island life. It's where color, rhythm, warmth, and memory are everywhere.
It is sensual, hopeful, moving, and cinematic.
Think emotional intimacy, golden sunsets, music in the streets, laughter through pain, and the feeling that life can begin again.
WHY THIS STORY MATTERS
We rarely see stories that center recovery with tenderness.
We rarely see Caribbean people shown in emotional depth beyond cliché.
We rarely see Black love stories rooted in healing instead of trauma.
We rarely see disability narratives filled with joy, dignity, romance, and possibility.
Melody Heals the Soul exists to change that.
Inspired by the real practice of Melodic Intonation Therapy, a treatment that uses melody and rhythm to help people living with aphasia regain speech, this film explores the profound relationship between music and the human spirit.
This story can only be told in Nevis.
Nevis is more than a backdrop. It is the pulse of the film.
The island’s landscape, soundscape, and spirit shape Nigel’s healing journey:
- waves breaking at Pinney’s Beach
- brass and bass drifting through the streets
- lush mountain roads
- warm village humor
- festival color and movement
- ancestral calm and modern rhythm
We will film across authentic local locations including:
- Pinney’s Beach
- Artisan Village
- Hot Springs area
- Golden Rock surroundings
- Village roads and gathering spaces
- Festival-inspired environments
Hot Springs
Pinney's Beach
Artisan Village
It is also home to the director and I. Honoring our heritage, this is cinema rooted in place.
MELODY HEALS THE SOUL is rooted in a belief that has guided me and my work across disciplines: rhythm is not decorative, it is diagnostic. Rhythm reveals what the body carries when language fails. Music is not an accompaniment to healing in this story. It is the pathway. I co-wrote this script with producer Louric Rankine and am directing it in our ancestral homeland of Nevis. We are both Brooklyn-born children of parents from St. Kitts & Nevis, raised inside households where artistry and labor coexisted without contradiction. My father was a welder for NYC Transit Authority, and also the local DJ and neighborhood photographer.
My mother was an NYC Department of Education assistant teacher. She became a certified ASL interpreter, and took up painting and poetry in retirement. The Nevis we know is populated by folks like them, technically skilled, creatively expansive, and spiritually layered. Too often, portrayals of the island flatten that dimensionality into backdrop or luxury fantasy. This film is a homecoming, an insistence on complexity.
While Nevis has recently been spotlighted through Broadway success and reality television tourism, MELODY HEALS THE SOUL bears witness to the fuller spectrum of our humanity. There are working hospitals, young scientists with global ambition, musicians confronting loss, and families negotiating disability with grace.
That is the Nevis we return to. In this story, a trumpet player recovering from traumatic brain injury and Broca’s aphasia confronts the loss of speech through Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT). A hearing impaired child experiences rhythm through vibration and visual cue. A young medical student works to culturally adapt aphasia treatment to the sonic textures of the Caribbean. Their arcs intersect through soca rehearsal, steel pan resonance, waterfalls, and clinical space.
MIT is not presented as abstract protocol. It is tested against the sonic reality of Nevis, Culturama rhythms, and ocean ambience. The film asks what happens when treatment reflects the cadence of the community it serves.
My mother’s ongoing work as an ASL interpreter directly informs the inclusivity woven into this narrative. I came of age watching language move through hands, faces, and bodies. Communication was never singular. That proximity to Deaf culture and signed language sharpened my understanding that access is not accommodation, it is design. Black women medical professionals are not peripheral, they are central innovators and caretakers.
In this film, communication unfolds through humming, signing, breath, tempo, and touch.
Our total production budget is $45,000.
We are proud to share that we have already raised $24,000 through incredible early supporters:
- Nevis Film Commission
- Columbia University School of the Arts Finishing Funds
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
That early support has helped launch pre-production and move this dream toward reality.
Now we are raising the final funds needed to complete production in Nevis and bring the film across the finish line.
Your contribution helps us cover:
- local crew hiring
- cast travel + lodging
- meals during production
- transportation on island
- equipment + sound needs
- art direction + wardrobe
- insurance + logistics
- editing, color, sound mix
- festival launch strategy
Every dollar goes directly on screen.
When you support this film, you are helping:
- amplify Caribbean storytelling
- support local jobs and creatives in Nevis
- champion disability awareness
- fund an independent Black-led production
- launch a globally resonant short film
You are not just donating. You are producing possibility.
TIMELINE
Spring – Early Summer
Casting, rehearsals, logistics, final fundraising
July
Production in Nevis (July 18-22)
Late Summer – Fall
Editing, score, color, sound design
Fall – Winter
Festival submissions + premiere strategy
1. Make a Pledge
Every contribution moves us closer to production.
2. Share the Campaign
Send this page to film lovers, music lovers, Caribbean communities, doctors, educators, and anyone who believes in healing stories.
3. Join Our Village
Independent films are built by community. Become part of ours.
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Pay the Crew
Costs $12,000
Our crew (local and NY-based) is the heartbeat of this film. The hand that shapes light, holds sound, and carry the story forward.
Pay the Cast
Costs $2,800
Actors. Moko Jumbie. Steelpan. Masquerade. Dancing. Their performances gives shape to loss, resilience, and rediscovery.
MIT Device
Costs $500
The MIT device is where science meets sound, where Melika reimagines healing through music. It is not just a prop, but an anchor.
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Tamika R. Guishard (director) is a first- generation Brooklyn-born filmmaker with roots in St. Kitts and Nevis. Her storytelling draws from African diasporic rhythm, public education, and place- based memory to center communities historically denied authorship. Before completing NYU Graduate Film, she taught middle school in her hometown of East New York, an experience that clarified storytelling as civic responsibility rather than purely artistic pursuit.
Her African dance-driven feature project has been recognized by NYU Purple List, Cannes Screenplay List, and Breaking Through the Lens, with support from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Rooftop Filmmakers Fund, and the inaugural Digital Bolex Women Cinematographers Award. Its proofs of concept screened at Oscar-qualifying festivals and were written, directed, produced, and largely shot by Black women. She has been a fellow with Athena Film Festival’s LA Writers Lab, Residency Unlimited, IFP Week’s No Borders Market, and Black Women Film! Canada at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
Adelphi University’s first Black communications professor and longtime cultural worker, Guishard builds films as living records. She uses rhythm, pedagogy, and ancestry to cultivate appreciation for universal humanity: amplifying marginalized voices to promote vital takeaways for survival and solutions.
Louric Rankine (producer) is a Brooklyn-born filmmaker, first generation from Jamaica and Saint Kitts and Nevis, and creative producer whose work centers on storytelling as a tool for liberation, representation, and transformation. With a passion for film production and international media distribution, Louric’s practice aims to decolonize media strategies and marketing models within the entertainment industry, expanding how intersectional narratives are told, shared, and sustained across cultures. He has been involved in film since high school, participating in programs like BAM, Hook Arts Media, BRIC and Reel Works.
A Posse Foundation Scholar, Louric continues to explore innovative approaches to storytelling that bridge artistic vision with equitable production models. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Producing at Columbia University. Alongside graduate studies, Louric served as a Teaching Artist at Reel Works, mentoring emerging filmmakers in Brooklyn to find their voice through visual media and community-centered storytelling. Previously, Louric has held roles across major media networks and creative organizations, including DISH Media, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and FilmNation Entertainment, building expertise in campaign coordination, post-production operations, and creative asset management.
These experiences have deepened Louric’s understanding of both the artistry and logistics of media production, from content delivery pipelines to global localization strategies. Through each project, whether in the classroom, on set, or in the editing room, Louric Rankine continues to imagine a media landscape that reflects the multiplicity of human experience and the power of film to connect, challenge, and heal.