The Brickmakers by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva
The Museum of Modern Art is screening two films by Colombian filmmakers Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva as part of its online series “Scenes from the Feminist Struggle in Colombia and India,” taking place Thursday, August 5 through Thursday 19 on MoMA’s Virtual Cinema for the museum’s members.
Nearly 90 and still at work, the Colombian anthropological filmmaker Marta Rodriguez, together with her late husband Jorge Silva, a photographer and cameraman, collaborated on a series of documentaries observing the centuries-old oppression, back-breaking labor, and fiercely preserved language and culture of the farmers and indigenous peoples of the Cauca region in Colombia’s Andean Cordilleras.
Organized by curator Joshua Siegel, the MoMA series will screen the films The Brickmakers / Chircales (1971) and Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future (1981). Depicting the shocking poverty, domestic abuse, and exploitation of indigenous women and children in southern Colombian highlands of Cauca, Marta Rodriguez and Jorge Silva’s first documentary The Brickmakers bears the traits of Marxist cinema that they would later abandon.
