Sembradoras de Vida (Mothers of the land)
Álvaro & Diego Sarmiento (PE)
Sembradoras de Vida (Mothers of the land) accompanies five women from the Andean highlands in their daily struggle to maintain a traditional and organic way of working the land.
In the Andean cosmovision, women and earth are strongly interrelated. Both, a woman's body and the earth’s soil are capable of giving and nurturing life.
In the context of an ever-growing industrialization of agriculture, the use of chemical pesticides and genetically modified seeds, it is the women who, connected as they are to earth through the bounds of sisterhood, take on the role of protectors.
The Sarmiento brothers, Álvaro (born in 1982) and Diego (1984), are two Peruvian directors whose films champion the rights of indigenous peoples and the cause of environmental conservation. Their feature-length debut, Río Verde. El tiempo de los Yakurunas (Green River. The Time of the Yakurunas) premiered in the 2017 BERLINALE Forum and was shown at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight 2019. Diego has directed several short films, two of which screened at the Berlinale: Earth’s Children in Generation in 2014 and Sonia’s Dream in the 2015 Culinary Cinema. Álvaro, who is also a visual artist and screenwriter, is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts & Literary Arts Residency.