Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva
Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva , couple of Colombian documentaries, authors among others of Chircales, film about the precariousness of some brick manufacturing workers south of Bogotá. They have been considered as pioneers of the anthropological documentary in Latin America; His work has covered agrarian, union, student movements, indigenous communities and Afro -Colombian cultures, turning his works into living testimonies in Colombia’s history since 1965.
Between 1963 and 1965, Marta studied cinema in France with the anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. In 1965 he returned to Colombia, he met the experienced photographer Jorge Silva, with whom he joins professionally and sentimentally, and they perform the famous documentary mediative that immediately won international recognition, placing Chircales as one of the most relevant documentaries of the new Latin American cinema.
Marta and Jorge worked together from the end of the sixties to his death, in 1987. His first collaboration was the aforementioned Chircales, which had its debut in the second Latin American filmmakers meeting held in Mérida, Venezuela, in 1968.
The couple’s second collaboration was Planas: testimony of an ethnocide, which premiered in 1973. The first part of his documentary “Peasants” won numerous awards at European Documentar Festivals throughout the years 1975 and 1976.
The fact that each of the aforementioned films is related to a different sector of the “low” classes: workers without instruction on the margins of the economy, the indigenous population that is completely out of social discourses, and rural workers also marginalized, indicates the sociological and political concern, as well as analytical precision of the cinema made by this couple of co -director, perhaps the most significant and stable in the history of Latin American cinema.
During the second semester of 1983 he performs the Chamber Directorate for Lucia Films – Fourth Channel of London – with the direction of Jhonthan Curling, the Colombian fragment of the Commodities project, with the production of the Venezuelan anthropologist Ruby of Valencia and on script (colonization and coffee) and Directorate of Actors of the Colombian Jorge Valencia Villegas. The General Directorate of the Project that included “Te de la India”, “Cafe del Barsil”, etc. It was from J. Anderton, S Clayton and J. Curling. The series was projected in 1985 in Europe.
Jorge Silva died in 1987 when the realization of being born again had not been completed. This film tells the story of some survivors to the tragedy of Armero, the Colombian people who were buried by the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz. With an unusual poetic, the documentary tells how after the overflow of the Lagunilla River, a 71 -year -old woman subsists in one of the tents of the victims. With a chicken given by Fidel Castro during her visit to the area, the old woman lives convinced that God will help her to replace everything lost before reaching the hundred years.
After Jorge’s death, Marta has continued with Tezón a work that gives, above all, of the misery and exploitation to which the indigenous people are subjected, in a work where he has managed to combine with mastery the audiovisual literacy. In the last productions, her son Lucas Silva accompanies her in front of the camera.
It is important to highlight that Marta has worked at UNESCO in the realization of video workshops in indigenous communities and in the writing of two books focused on the teaching and memories of the video and their origins in Colombian indigenous peoples (1989-1998)
Filmography [ To edit ]
- 2011 – Witnesses of an ethnocide: resistance memories
- 2006 – Soraya, love is not forgetting (52 minutes)
- 2004 – A house alone expires (52 minutes)
- 2001 – Never Again (Documentary Media Video)
- 2001 – The sacred leaf (52 minutes)
- 1998 – The children of thunder (semi -outskirty media video)
- 1998 – AMAPOLA, Damn Flower (Documentary Media Video)
- 1992 – Living Memory (Documentary Video)
- 1988 – Love, Women and Flowers (Documentary Media)
- 1987 – Born again (documentary short film)
- 1981 – The voice of the survivors (documentary short film)
- 1976/1981 – Our Voice of Land, Memory and Future (Documentary)
- 1975 – Peasants (Documentary Media)
- 1970/1971 – Planas: Testimony of an ethnocide (documentary)
- 1966/1972 – Chircales (Documental Mediometraje)
Awards (incomplete) [ To edit ]
external links [ To edit ]
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