Silvio Rodriguez: My First Calling
New Day Films
•
25m
Directed by Catherine Murphy • Documentary • With Silvio Rodriquez • 2022 • 25 minutes
My First Calling explores the little-known story of global music giant Silvio Rodriguez, who intimately recounts coming of age on the youth brigades of the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign, where at only 14-years of age he taught a rural campesino family how to read and write.
Edited together with newly digitized 16mm film footage from the Latin American Newsreels produced and directed by Santiago Alvarez from 1960 to 1990, and with a soundtrack of both Silvio classic compositions and those of younger generation contemporary Cuban composers, he shares the experience of his “first social project” and its relevance for the present.
“Murphy manages to reconstruct an intimate vision of the campaign through the memories that the musician shares.” —María Isabel Alfonso, NACLA Review
Up Next in New Day Films
-
My Brooklyn
Directed by Kelly Anderson • Documentary • With Jamel Shabazz, Craig Steven Wilder, Kelly Anderson • 2012 • 76 minutes
My Brooklyn follows director Kelly Anderson's journey, as a Brooklyn gentrifier, to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood. The film documents the redevelopment of Ful...
-
Side by Side: Out of a South Korean O...
Directed by Glenn Morey and Julie Morey, co-directors • Documentary • 2018 • 38 minutes
What happens when the lives of children are reset by adoption, sent to grow up in new countries and families of a different race, language, and culture? To find out, the Side by Side project spent 10 years fi...
-
Time Passages
Directed by Kyle Henry • Documentary • With Kyle Henry, Elaine Henry, Richard Henry • 2024 • 86 minutes
In the final months of his mother Elaine’s late-stage dementia, as a pandemic rages across the globe, filmmaker Kyle Henry time travels via his family archive and his own memories to heal past...