MARTA RODRÍGUEZ

Marta Rodríguez (1933) has never been merely an anthropologist or merely a documentary filmmaker. From her first film, The Brickmakers, 196672 (Chircales), to her present work, Rodríguez has always shown herself to be a politically committed, independent anthropological filmmaker, who uses documentary to analyze the living and working conditions and world view of peasants, native peoples, and workers in her native Colombia. Rodríguez, like the other members of the New Latin American Cinema movement that arose in the mid-1950s, views cinema as a powerful means to analyze the socio-economic and political reality and as a stimulus to the "lower" classes and marginal groups to better understand and/or to transform their politics and their lives.