Marta Rodríguez (I)

Marta Rodríguez is the most veteran Latin American woman filmmaker. Together with her late husband Jorge Silva, Rodriguez was one of the most prominent figures of the New Latin American Cinema movement from the 1960’s and 1970’s. She has been making documentaries since 1960 when she was a Jean Rouch’s student in Paris. Later, her cinema borrowed from neo-realism and cinema vérité to begin documenting Colombian realities. In 1968, her documentary Chircales (Brickmakers) became famous in international circles for the attention it brought to working children in Latin America. A recurrent topic in her filmmaking career has been the historical violence exercised on Latin American indigenous communities as well as African heritage communities. From 1968 to 1987, Rodríguez worked with her husband documenting the consequences of Colombian bipartisan violence (the period known as La Violencia). In 1987, Silva died as they were editing a documentary on the unequal job conditions for women in the flower greenhouses outside Bogotá (Colombia is second to Holland in the global exporting market of flowers). Upon Silva’s death, Rodríguez continued on her own documenting the dramatic impact of neoliberal policies and the emergence of narcotraficking economies on indigenous communities. This work galvanized in a trilogy called Amapola, la flor maldita (Poppy, the Dammed Flower). She has also worked in a trilogy entitled Urabá (The Urabá Trilogy) that documents the difficult task Afro-Colombian women had faced as displaced subjects, victims of war, and family heads.