In 1997 Janet Rosenberg Jagan, “a Jewish grandmother from Chicago,” was elected president of Guyana. How she became the first American-born woman to lead a nation is the focus of this highly entertaining film by Suzanne Wasserman (Rosenberg's niece). In the 1940s Rosenberg fell in love with Cheddi Jagan, an exchange student from then British Guyana. Married against her parents' wishes, she and Jagan relocated to his country, founding the Marxist People's Progressive Party and devoting their lives to the struggle for equality and independence, first from British rule, then from CIA interference. Illuminating the Cold War, Third World liberation, American foreign policy, and political idealism through the prism of a remarkable love story, Thunder in Guyana is a tribute to a life truly stranger than fiction.