Dreaming to Change the World

Dreaming  to change the World: The films of the Victor Jara Collective is a rare  outing for two films from Guyana - The Terror and the Time (1978) and In  the Sky's Wild Noise (1983). 

Named in honour of the Chilean musician and dissident Victor Jara, the collective was influenced by the New Latin American and Third Cinema  movements as well as the theories of Soviet montage and the European avant-garde. The collective—born out of a Marxist study group at Cornell University—aimed to create work that explored Guyana’s own political, social and economic struggles as a newly postcolonial nation.

Composed of file footage and photographs as well as contemporary interviews, and  narrated by Martin Carter reading some of his reading his acclaimed poems, The Terror and the Time considers the political upheaval that took place in what was then British Guiana in 1953. In the Sky's Wild  Noise, meanwhile, is built around an interview with Walter Rodney, and investigates the socio-economic situation in Guyana in the late 1970s.

Lewanne  ones of the Victor Jara Collective will be present, and will take part  in a post-screening discussion along with the composer of The Terror and the Time, Keith Waithe, and Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London.

This event is presented in association with Birkbeck Institute for the  Moving Image, Third Horizon Film Festival, Guyana SPEAKS and the Centre  for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies.