We continue the program “Remember Freedom: Images of Resistance” with a screening of two films selected by Karla Crnčević. We will show two films that, from different historical, political, and cinematic positions, speak about women’s labor, resistance, organizing, and absent images.

In the documentary film Love, Women and Flowers by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, shot in Colombia in 1989, the question of producing beauty becomes a question of labor, health, and global inequality. The film follows women workers in the Colombian flower industry, whose carnations and other flowers are exported to the international market, especially to the United States. Behind the low price and constant availability of flowers stand dangerous working conditions, the intensive use of pesticides, and the labor of tens of thousands of women on plantations around Bogotá. The film shows how the flower industry on the Bogotá savanna developed from the 1970s onward thanks to cheap labor, favorable climatic conditions, and the possibility of production at very low cost. Since flowers for export must look flawless, their production relies on pesticides and fungicides, including substances banned in countries such as the United States, Germany, and France. Through the testimonies of women workers, the film records the health consequences of this labor, the pressures of the industry, and the attempts of women to organize as they fight for better conditions and a dignified position.

The short film The Stonebreakers / Las Picapedreras by Argentine filmmaker Azul Aizenberg, made in 2021, returns to the Great Strike in Tandil in 1908, initiated by women quarry workers. Not a single image of that event has survived. What remains are only testimonies in a forgotten book and one fiction film from the 1970s. A century later, the filmmaker reconstructs this history through found film materials, archival traces, and gestures of women from other films. The film begins from a historical absence: if there are no images of the women who took part in the strike, where can they be found? Aizenberg looks for their absent images in the bodies, movements, and gazes of other women, creating a cinematic collage about labor, rebellion, and memory. The Stonebreakers reminds us that the victory of that strike would not have been possible without the women who stood at the forefront of the struggle.

Azul Aizenberg (Buenos Aires, 1993) is a filmmaker graduated from Universidad del Cine (FUC). She has created the amateur film workshop Ver y Poder. She wrote and directed the short film Last Land (2016), Amiga (2019) and The Stonebreakers (2021) as well as her first feature film Disposable Love (2025).

Marta Rodríguez (Bogotá, 1933.) is a Colombian documentary filmmaker and screenwriter, widely regarded as one of the foundational figures of political and ethnographic cinema in Latin America. She is best known for socially committed documentaries made with Jorge Silva, especially Chircales (1971), and for films focused on Indigenous communities, labor, memory, and state violence in Colombia. Her work has been recognized internationally for its long-term, collaborative approach to documentary filmmaking.

The screening is part of the film and video programme “Remember Freedom: Images of Resistance”. The subtitles will be in English.

Many thanks to the Dokukino KIC.

The program is supported by:
Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb
Kultura Nova Foundation
Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC)