Amid Bogotá’s urban estates, pottery workers face inhumane exploitation by employers. The intricate connections between technological advancements, production relations, and the ideological framework within this community of laborers, reveal the deep-seated issues that perpetuate their struggle.

Brickmakers opens with an epigraph from Marx then persists in that spirit of revolution. Countering a primitive system of horse-drawn contraptions and oppressed people worked to the bone, it uses direct cinema’s innovations in a bold effort to liberate those living hand-to-mouth in 1970s Colombia.