Honor Ford-Smith is a scholar, theatre worker and poet. She was educated in Jamaica at St Andrew High School and after studying theatre began teaching at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston. She became co-founder and artistic director of Sistren, a theatre collective of mainly working-class Jamaican women that works in community theatre and popular education. She moved to Toronto, Canada in 1991, receiving her doctorate in education from the University of Toronto in 2004. She continues to write, to work in performance, and to teach at York University, where she is an Associate Professor in the Community Arts Practice program under the Faculty of Environmental Studies. Photo from Fuse Magazine (Nov – Dec, 1981).
C.M. Harclyde Walcott was born in Barbados. He was educated at Erdiston Model, then Modern High in Bridgetown, and York University in Toronto. He has, among other occupations, worked as a theatre director, filmmaker, and photojournalist, and currently resides in Barbados.
In the documentary Sweet Sugar Rage, being presented at THFF25 in a new, extended restoration, Sistren Collective, a popular Jamaican women’s troupe, uses improvisation and theater as consciousness-raising tools for both rural and urban audiences. Their performances speak directly to the daily experiences of women—the least empowered workers, who labor long hours for low wages with no benefits or rights to organize for better conditions. Using role-play and interviews with female cane workers, the collective develops dramatizations which analyze social issues and pinpoint their concerns.
A Q+A with Lana Finikin, a member of Sistren Collective, will follow the screening.
Sweet Sugar Rage screens at THFF25 with the film Women of Suriname (1978) as part of the retrospective program You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985.
This screening is presented in partnership with
Miami Workers Center
