Cursed Flowers and Sacred Leaves: The Militant Cinema of Marta Rodríguez

Marta Rodríguez has spent decades gathering the voices, experiences, and cosmogonies of the peasant and indigenous peoples of Colombia, in some of the areas where coca and poppy are grown. This screening and discussion proposes alternative ways of approaching the issue of drug production and trade, contextualising the substance chains that link Colombia to Scotland – a country with historically high consumption rates.

Long before Colombia became a flashpoint of the war on drugs, Marta Rodríguez was already filming and talking with some of the Indigenous and peasant communities that would get caught up in it. These two video pieces, made in the middle of a long career, are unpretentious, urgent works that ask audiences to listen to people as they grapple with the arrival of illicit cash crops, followed by deadly herbicides. Rodríguez’s own archive places these moments in a long history of colonial land grabs and dispossession, in which Indigenous relationships to the territory and their sacred plants have been denigrated and suppressed.

The screening will be followed by a panel conversation between the audience, Dr. María A. Vélez-Serna ( Film & Media, University of Stirling) and Dr. Andrei Gomez-Suarez (Rodeemos el Diálogo, University of Winchester) and will be presented by the feminist collective Invisible Women and Cinemaattic.

Films:

La hoja sagrada / The Sacred Leaf
Marta Rodríguez, Colombia, 2001, 52 mins.

This documentary explores the contrast between two perceptions of the coca plant. While indigenous communities understand it as a sacred and medicinal food, they suffer the impacts of glyphosate fumigation as the ‘war on drugs’ blames them for illicit cultivation. Through this line, The Sacred Leaf is an approach to the indigenous community of Guambia (Cauca), where Rodríguez’s interviewees expose this situation as a consequence of historical injustices, and look for solutions that respect culture and life.


Amapola, la flor maldita / Poppy, The Cursed Flower
Marta Rodríguez & Lucas Silva, Colombia, 1998, 32 mins.

This film documents the rise of poppy cultivation to produce heroin in Colombia during the early 90s. Drug traffickers, who brought in the poppy seed, enter the indigenous territories creating criminal gangs that attack the entire community. Faced with this panorama, the Indigenous people and peasants explain the need for social approaches to the problem, rather than state repression.