We are excited to be presenting an online screening of Sweet Sugar Rage by Sistren Theatre Collective and a newly-commissioned poem by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, as part of Cinenova’s ‘The Work We Share:’ a public programme of digitised films from the Cinenova collection addressing representations of gender, race, sexuality, health and community. The films are captioned by Collective Text, and supported by response commissions from contemporary artists and writers.
Following a screening of the film back in July 2022, we are excited to be hosting Sweet Sugar Rage online again on our website homepage, and extending the opportunity for a wide audience to engage with this important work.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. Her work has appeared widely in publications including The White Review, the London Review of Books, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry collection, QUIET, won the Rathbones Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf, Penguin Random House.
‘Sweet Sugar Rage’ exposed the exploitation of women’s labour in Jamaica’s sugar cane fields and shared the themes and methods of Sistren’s workshops and theatre in the context of their wider efforts in education, employment rights and community activism. The film combined the testimony of women that work in the cane fields with evidence of their working conditions and their employers attitudes as the basis of drama workshops that bring rural and urban women into dialogue to analyse the exploitation of working class women’s labour and to challenge the patriarchal attitudes of employers and unions alike. Following the methods of Freire’s ‘conscietization’ and Brecht’s ‘alienation method,’ we see the women collectively take charge of staging and re-staging ways to challenge the systems that oppress them, which offers methodologies of learning together to acquire the feminist and decolonial tools to effect social change.