Doors 6:30p
Program 7:00p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

In the mid-1970s, a group of students and professors at Cornell University united by an urgency to make revolutionary art formed the Victor Jara Collective, named after the Chilean musician assassinated during the Pinochet regime. In 1976, they traveled to Guyana to, as Victor Jara Collective member Lewanne Jones put it, “make film, forge cultural alliances, and activate revolution.” What they brought back is The Terror and the Time, a landmark of anticolonial cinema.

The Flaherty and UnionDocs are thrilled to present a special screening of a newly restored version of The Terror and the Time, followed by a conversation with Lewanne Jones of the Victor Jara Collective and Bill Brand of BB Optics, who has been leading the restoration of the Collective’s work. The discussion will be moderated by documentary filmmaker Pam Yates and introduced by Janaína Oliveira.

This screening emerges from Oferenda, a special film program curated by Christopher Harris and Janaina Oliveira for Onward! – the 70th Flaherty Film Seminar. Presented as an offering, the program was rooted in what Janaina describes as “a profoundly Black feeling and practice,” one that draws on Afro-diasporic epistemologies as curatorial tools and thinks from the crossroads, where narrative arguments and disagreements coexist, preferring “and” instead of “or.”

Program

USA/Guyana, 1979, 70min

The terror is British colonialism in Guyana; the time is 1953, the year of the first elections under a provisional democratic constitution. Stylized scenes photographed throughout Georgetown accompany the poetry of Martin Carter to convey a sense of intense political reform against poverty, repression and silence. The film unfolds against the international backdrop of the 50s: the growth of foreign economic and military interests in the Caribbean basin, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Mau Mau revolts in Kenya, the Cold War, and the U.S.’ covert wars against Cuba, Malaysia, Vietnam, Iran and Nigeria. In his forward to Poems of Resistance by his comrade and compatriot Martin Carter, the great Guyanese writer Eusi Kwayana, implies that poetry is criticism. This sense of criticism held and released in and before art animates The Terror and the Time. The film offers poetic practice, historical criticism, and critical historiography in a rehearsal of sound, image, ground, and aspiration… Rupert Roopnaraine, a key figure in the Victor Jara Collective, suggested that the product betrays the process so that the film’s unfinishedness is given in accord with anticolonial struggle. As he argues, what is important is that the struggle remains. And what remains is the unstill consistency of the cartman and the dark, glimpsed by and given in criticism, through the absolute dissolution of the poem and the poet, the filmmaker and the film.

Bios

Guyana’s Victor Jara Collective may have  produced just two films, yet as an example of  a politically committed and formally radical  approach to documentary filmmaking, their  intervention remains unique in the relatively  short history of indigenous Caribbean cinema  production. 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. 

Victor Jara Collective member Lewanne Jones will be present for the event. 

Lewanne Jones is an audio-visual researcher and Archival Producer in New York City.  She began her work in archives in the late 1970s as a member of the Victor Jara Collective that produced a ground-breaking documentary about colonialism in British Guiana, The Terror and The Time. Since then, she has conducted international research for films and television series, museum installations and online educational productions. Her work has been recognized by two nominations for News & Documentary Emmy awards (in the archival research category), most recently in 2022 and she received an Acker Award for community archival contributions in New York City. Eyes on the Prize, ABC’s Century, PBS’s Freedom Riders and Black Panther: Vanguard of the Revolution, 32 Sounds and Borderland are among the award-winning projects to which she has contributed. She has conducted workshops on archival theory and practice at media research centers including at Union Docs and BRIC TV (Brooklyn,) the Better Angels Foundation (Washington DC) and the Global Media Research Center (Illinois), and has mentored emerging filmmakers in the craft of using archival materials. Since 2018, she has been presenting the work of the Victor Jara Collective at festivals in the US, Great Britain, Belgium and Chile and is the project manager for the preservation and restoration of its two films, The Terror and The Time (1978) and In The Sky’s Wild Noise (1983).  

Bill Brand is a multi-disciplinary artist whose films, public artwork, installations, paintings and works-on-paper have exhibited worldwide in museums, galleries, film festivals, microcinemas and on television. His 1980 Masstransiscope is an animated mural permanently installed in the New York City subway as part of the permanent collection of the MTA Arts & Design. Bill Brand’s artwork has been featured at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Anthology Film Archive and Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. His films have been presented at major film festivals including the Berlin Film Festival, New Directors/ New Films Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Light Field Festival, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Prismatic Ground Film Festival and the Flaherty Film Seminar.  He is represented by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris and Court Tree Collective, Brooklyn.   Invisible Fisherman: The Art of Bill Brand was published by Eyewash Books and Visual Studies Workshop and released in April 2026.Bill Brand teaches film preservation at New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation graduate program and is Professor Emeritus at Hampshire College.

Pamela Yates is an award-winning film director and the co-founder of  Skylight, a not-for-profit media organization that for over 40 years has combined cinematic arts with the quest for justice to inspire the defense of human rights. Skylight’s films and programs strengthen social justice movements and catalyze collaborative networks of artists and activists. She is the Director of the Sundance Special Jury award winning When the Mountains Tremble; the Executive Producer of the Academy Award winning Witness to War; and the Director of State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism, which has been translated into 47 languages and broadcast in 154 countries. It was awarded the Overseas Press Award for Best Reporting in Any Medium about Latin America. Her film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, for which she awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, was used as key forensic evidence in the genocide trial against Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. Her third film in the Guatemalan trilogy, 500 YEARS had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on POV/PBS, streamed as part of Amazon Prime Festival Stars and is currently in wide release.  Her feature length documentary BORDERLAND | The Line Within, about the war against immigrants in the U.S., is currently touring in  cinemas across the country and in Latin American, as well as streaming. For her work on BORDERLAND, Pamela received the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism from Yale University.  She was awarded the inaugural Art of Activism Award, along with Paco de Onís, by the Woodstock Film Festival in 2024.  Pamela is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Writers Guild of America, and the International Documentary Association and is on the Advisory Board of the Woodstock Film Festival.