21 November |  Our Voice of Land, Memory and Future (Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro)

Marta Rodríguez & Jorge Silva 

1981 | Colômbia | 105′ | legendas PT

Com apresentação de Victor Guimarães 

Com o apoio da Embaixada do Brasil em Portugal 

The indigenous and black roots of Latin American people should be understood as the only developed force on this continent. […] Popular culture is not technically folklore; it‘s the popular language of permanent historical rebellion. 

Glauber Rocha, The Aesthetics of Dreams (1971)

Following from the Doc’s Kingdom 2026 seminar, held in the beginning of November and dedicated to the militant images that travel through “Undercurrents, counterspells”,  Our Voice of Land, Memory and Future will be exhibited at Cinemateca Portuguesa. The decades-long collaborative work of Marta Rodríguez, documentary filmmaker and anthropologist, with self-taught director of photography Jorge Silva will be introduced by Victor Guimarães, co-programmer of Doc’s Kingdom International Seminar for Documentary Film. 

As Guimarães writes about the film: “In Our Voice of Land, Memory and Future, a thorough account of the struggles of the Indigenous community of Coconuco in Colombia is interwoven with highly stylised, allegorical sequences. However, the work draws no clear distinction between documentary and fiction. The history of the formation of the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) is as integral to the film as its enactments of mythological narratives.

This constant interplay between magical thought and political discourse creates a complex structure shaped by years of ethnographic research that Marta Rodríguez conducted with the Paeces, Guambianos, and Arhuacos communities in the region. It all began with a failed screening of Campesinos (1975), their previous film, for members of the CRIC. […] The intricate cinematic forms of Our Voice of Land, Memory and Future could never overcome the disasters produced by centuries of oppression. Yet the energy they generate becomes sensory material for perceiving reality, nourishment for political imagination, and fuel for the struggles to come.”

Victor Guimarães Brazilian programmer, film critic and professor, currently a programmer at FICValdivia (Chile) and artistic director of FENDA (Brazil), who has curated programmes for venues such as XCèntric (Barcelona), Essay Film Festival (London), Woche der Kritik (Berlin) and Cinemateca de Bogotá.

Marta Rodríguez was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1933. She studied sociology in Barcelona and at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, where her professors included the Colombian socialist and Roman Catholic priest Camilo Torres. In 1961, she moved to Paris to study anthropology, ethnology and film. There, she got to know the French documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch. In 1965, she returned to Bogotá and continued her anthropology studies. She also founded the student film club Ocho y Medio and met her eventual husband, the photographer and cameraman Jorge Silva. Together, they worked on Chircales (1971), their first of many joint film projects. Rodríguez still works as a documentary filmmaker. She completed her latest film, La Sinfónica de los Andes, together with her son Lucas Silva.

Jorge Silva was born in Girardot, Colombia in 1941 and grew up in Bogotá. He studied literature and visual arts, and worked as a photographer and journalist. In the early 1960s, he became involved in the student film club movement and made his first film, Días de Papel. He and Marta Rodríguez met in 1965 and later married, and together they made their first joint film, Chircales (1971). In addition to their close collaboration in the following decades, he also worked as a DP on other projects. Jorge Silva died in 1987.