Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro

A landmark of radical filmmaking that deserves to be much more widely known, Jorge Silva and Marta Rodriguez’s hybrid documentary was made in collaboration with the indigenous farmers of Colombia’s Coconuco region. The film details their centuries-long struggle to reclaim the land first stolen from them by Spanish con- quistadors, the Catholic Church, and by wealthy Euro-Colombians who ran roughshod over tribal rights with the help of the country’s capitalist-military power structure. OUR VOICE documents the actions of the revolutionary Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), an organization of peasants who are working to take back the land of their ancestors through legal means as well as by guerrilla tactics. In bands of farmer’s militias, they face down the police armed only with hoes and machetes, breaking into the landowners’ farms and tilling the earth in defiance. Exhibiting influences as diverse as Glauber Rocha, Santiago Alvarez, and Patricio Guzman, OUR EARTH combines Marxist materialism with native cosmology, explaining the peasants’ spiritual connection to the land and their belief that those who have taken it from them are in league with the Devil himself. (Michael Sicinski)