Last Friday, I saw the premiere of We Women Warriors / Tejiendo Sabiduria at the IFC Center in the Village (NYC). This documentary, by Nicole Karsin, who was on hand for Q&A after the screening, followed three Colombian indigenous activists: Doris (Awá(, Ludis (Kankuamo), and Flor Ilva (Nasa). Their communities are caught between the military, FARC, and paramilitary forces and the attendant violence. Some of them have lost their husbands and are left as single parents, a situation they share with many women in their communities. While the killing of men has left many widows and fatherless children, women as well as children are also direct targets of violence. The film contains graphic content and shows how many people are so easily wrongly accused or framed. As female leaders, these three women are charged with making decisions on sensitive issues that affect their communities. They also work to find more sustainable working conditions. This includes a discussion about the irreconcilable positions of the protagonists of the war on drugs and (indigenous, in this case) farmers who have little alternatives to growing coca.
I often marvel at the footage that documentary filmmakers are able to capture given the risky circumstances they are filming. During the Q&A, I asked Karsin how she navigated the line between wanting to get these women’s (and people’s) stories to a greater audience, but also possibly putting them in danger as a result. Also, does having a film crew on hand help to temper a potentially violent situation? Karsin responded by noting that the Nasa themselves have better video equipment than she does and were on hand filming one of the events which I referred to (that could have taken a violent turn). Although I think that having a foreign filmmaker on hand at that particular event may have made a difference (although she did not, and with her experience, she would know better), the point is well taken that indigenous people are themselves protagonists in the documentation of these events. So, she was not putting them at greater risk than the community itself was taking in also filming. The time invested in documentaries also never ceases to impress me. In response to another moviegoer, Karsin noted that the film took 6 years to make, with varying degrees of time to gain the trust of the three women highlighted in the film, which has not yet been screened in Colombia.
This documentary would be useful for any class dealing with indigenous women in Latin America; the war on drugs and coca production; and the ongoing armed conflict in Colombia.
In signing off, I’d like to thank my cousin Yvonne who attended the film screening with me. I don’t think I gave her enough of an explanation about this film, so I think it was a rude awakening after having our quiet vegan dinner at Cafe Blossom a few blocks away! But she said she was glad to have attended because it’s good to see what’s going on out there in the rest of the world. Which would make a good slogan for a t-shirt for documentaries. And I couldn’t agree more. Until next time…
Early on in the film Tejiendo Sabiduria / We Women Warriors, Doris, a tribal governor, explains how she became an activist. When she was young her mother would travel up into the mountains to educate children in the most remote areas of her province. Director Nicole Karsin’s camera zooms in on a yellowing photo of a smiling young woman standing proudly in a tailored pants suit. We hear Doris speaking in the voice-over as she recalls how her mother was killed in a car accident returning from her work with the children in the mountains.
In a later scene, we see Doris at a tribal meeting pleading for some true government assistance to turn around the devastating cycle of violence that has caught the Awa in the middle of wars between the state, paramilitary forces and rebels. Why can’t the government build roads, she exclaims, instead of sending in soldiers and helicopters? If they built roads, the people could plant produce other than coca and get it to market speedily. With the current infrastructure, it takes four days to bring plantains to market and by the time a farmer gets them there, they fetch very little money. The trip is hardly worth it. Coca, on the other hand, is a very lucrative crop, easy to harvest, convertible to a highly desired commodity, and does not require many days to get to market.
If you put the pieces together, it becomes clear that the poor roads that discourage the local farmers from getting out of the deadly drug trade are probably the same roads that led to Doris’ mother’s death. Doris, though, might be considered one of the lucky ones. Unlike Ludis, the second woman warrior profiled in this moving documentary, Doris did not witness a family member brutally dragged from her home and then gunned down in the town square. She says this directly to a young woman, a part of Ludis’ weaving circle, who questions her directly. Are you a victim like us? No, Doris says, carefully, I did not lose a family member to violence. But the audience can draw its own conclusion. There are so many victims here: the collection of women whose husbands have been singled out and murdered, the young female activist whose mother died on a treacherous road, whose fellow citizens are literally land-locked by their physical isolation and lack of good roads into growing a dangerous crop, the Nasa who live against the slope of a mountain under the careful eyes of soldiers crouched behind sandbag embankments.
The most pitiful victims of all, though, are the children. We hear Ludis’ sister recall a conversation between young boy cousins who wonder if one of them joins the rebels to avenge the death of his father, and then kills someone in the family of the first, if he then becomes a paramilitary to avenge this death, will he need to kill his own cousin? The choices are those that no child should have to make.
Karsin has painstakenly put together a film where the lives and suffering of three peoples, as in tribes of people, and three people, as in three individual women, converge with the promise of hope. These women are fighting against huge odds, to protect the lives of their tribesmen and women, to improve the conditions under which they live, and to get a message out to their own government and to the government of the United States, that the violence has to end. Too many innocent people have gotten caught in the middle of someone else’s war. Let’s hope the people who need to see this film do. The message could not be told in a more dramatic way.
Beth, thanks so much for your thoughts on this film!