‘Sweet Sugar Rage’ is a documentary which examines the harsh conditions facing female workers on a Jamaican sugar estate. To a Reggae rhythm we travel with the women of Sistren Theatre Collective from a Kingston ghetto to the green sugar cane fields of Clarendon. We meet Iris who, after 25 years as a sugar worker, was unable to continue in the fields because of ill-health. Eventually, the management offered her a post as supervisor but as a woman, Iris received only half the wages of her male colleagues. Her clashes with the union and management over rights to equal pay for equal work along with the concerns raised by her co-workers, such as the need for protective clothing; training to use new equipment; proper union representation and the unfair division of labour between women and men, form the basis of a drama workshop organised by Sistren for urban women in Kingston to look at the problems that confront working-class women and to search for a common solution.

Sistren is a women's popular theatre company based in Kingston, Jamaica, which uses drama-in-education as a means of problem-solving at a community level; questioning in particular society's failure to value the work and skills of women. The tape is an exciting example of how drama can be used to educate and mobilise women.

...in the nine years of Sistren's work we have explored many different forms – theatre, workshops, screen print, magazine, film, dance, music.

We have voiced the right of Caribbean women to work at the occupations of their choice for a fair wage; to have children with the men we choose; to be free from sexual violence. We have urged women to organise for a greater share of power... and for men to share the responsibilities of child care and housework. Simple things perhaps, but things denied to women all over the world by design and circumstance.

– Honor Ford Smith, Artistic Director, Sistren Theatre Collective

Description source: Circles catalogue (1987). Edited by Jenny Holland and Jane Harris.