The screening of Brown Sugar Too Bitter For Me in Georgetown last week marks not only the release of the latest work in the building of a Guyanese film industry, but the third attempt to treat issues and struggles in the sugar industry in a movie. This film continues to reveal a number of the imperfections that still accompany the noble efforts at national cinematography, although it nevertheless has to be regarded as an achievement. Despite limitations it is a contribution that can be taken seriously. Not all the previous efforts fall in that category.
In the early 1980s the history of Guyanese cinematography records the first attempt at a film set on the sugar plantations of British Guiana. That was a screenplay based on a novel Songs of the Sugarcanes by Sheik Sadeek, one of Guyana’s important playwrights. It depicts the evils of indentureship and its aftermath, and was also the first move at a film on
