THFF'18: Dreaming to Change the World: The Films of The Victor Jara Collective + Guyanese Roti Brunch

Showings

O Cinema Wynwood Sun, Sep 30, 2018 11:00 AM

Description

Third Horizon Film Festival is proud this year to feature a retrospective of the films of Guyana’s Victor Jara Collective, marking the 40th anniversary of the release of their feature-length documentary The Terror and the Time (1978). And in celebration of the works of The Victor Jara Collective and Walter Rodney, THFF is starting your Sunday off with a roti brunch from B&M Market! Enjoy delicious curries and stews before heading inside for a Guyanese film retrospective.

 

Named in honor of the Chilean musician and dissident Victor Jara, who was murdered by the Pinochet regime in 1973, and influenced by the politically committed New Latin American cinema of the 1960s, the collective formed with the intention of making formally daring films that explored Guyana’s own political, social and economic struggles as an emergent postcolonial nation.

 

The Terror and the Time, their first film, focused on the upheavals in 1953 in what was then British Guiana. The documentary was essentially banned by the Guyanese government, and it would be five years before the collective made their second and final film, In the Sky’s Wild Noise (1983), featuring the late historian, writer and activist Walter Rodney, author of the seminal book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, who had been assassinated by a car bomb in Guyana in 1980.

 

Screening in conjunction with the retrospective will be a new documentary film, The Past Is Not Our Future: The Student Years of Walter Rodney (2017), which retraces the time Rodney spent as an undergraduate at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in the early 1960s. The film’s director, Matthew Smith, will be present.

 

The Terror and the Time
Directed by The Victor Jara Collective
Guyana / 75 minutes / 1978 / English
In 1953, what was then known as British Guiana elected its first “internal self government” under colonial rule. Nervous about the government’s progressive programs and supposed Soviet influence, the British suspended the constitution, jailed the democratically elected leaders, and staged a military invasion. Made in 1978, The Terror and the Time is an incendiary piece of agitprop documentary filmmaking that revisits the events of that seminal year in Guyanese history. Set to a series of poems by the great poet Martin Carter and against the backdrop of the Cold War and events of 1953 in such places as Iran, Guatemala, Kenya and the US, this film—the first of only two works by the Victor Jara Collective—was banned by Guyana’s government, and has rarely screened since it was made.

 

In the Sky’s Wild Noise
Directed by The Victor Jara Collective
Guyana / 29 minutes / 1983 / English
In the Sky’s Wild Noise is based around an interview with Walter Rodney, the renowned Guyanese historian, author and political activist, who was assassinated in 1980. The interview—which was filmed in 1976, when the Victor Jara Collective were shooting their first documentary, The Terror and The Time—is intercut with archival footage, and explores the political, social and economic conditions of the working class in Guyana in the 1970s.

 

The Past Is Not Our Future: The Student Years of Walter Rodney
Directed by Matthew Smith
Jamaica / 45 minutes / 2018 / English
Exactly 50 years ago, the Jamaican government banned the late Guyanese writer and academic Walter Rodney from re-entering the country, where he was employed at the University of the West Indies, due to his political activism. In this absorbing  documentary, rare film footage and photographs of Rodney combine with personal testimonies to form a revealing portrait of the “guerrilla intellectual” during his university years at the selfsame Jamaica campus.