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