Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro

The dominant subject of the films of Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva is the centuries-long oppression of farmers and indigenous peoples in Colombia, and their equally long resistance. While the early films analysed these conditions using a vocabulary informed by Marxism, indigenous cosmogony became more and more influential in their later work. The result of this clarification process – unthinkable without the critical participation of the indigenous farmers of Coconuco – is Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro, whose images no longer function as argumentative proof for eyewitness accounts, but rather form a tightly woven system of signs: furrows in the landscape, the backs of animals, the gestures of monuments, the myths and masks of the people and the breath that brings musical instruments to life. “Our cinema must also be beautiful, as beautiful as possible,” noted Jorge Silva of Nuestra voz de tierra when it first screened at the Forum in 1982. This digital restoration honours an important work of Latin American political cinema, one that doesn’t posit indigenous culture in romantic contrast to modernity, but rather recognizes in it an aesthetic of resistance.