Our Mothers

It is difficult to convey and give an original plastic form to pain and wounded memory, even in a medium as ductile as cinema, and in a genre as apt as drama. «Nuestras madres» almost succeeds, but there are times when declamatory theatricality does not allow it to reach the level of classic tragedy, although the attempt is worthy.

As it is often seen in films from Argentina or Chile, the Guatemalan civil war (1960-96) that eroded the foundations of civil society, and the genocide of the Mayan people by the military dictators and the national army, are lacerations that will not heal soon and will emerge from time to time in the cinema of this Central American country. As the first feature of versatile Guatemalan filmmaker César Díaz, a director, writer, producer, and cinematographer who is mainly a film editor (he cut Jayro Bustamante's «Ixcanul» and assisted the editor of Iñárritu's «Amores perros»), it is curious that the aspect that I find somehow irregular in his film is the montage.

With gorgeous cinematography by Virginie Surdej, «Nuestras madres» tells the story of Ernesto (Armando Espitia), a young forensic anthropologist who works on the exhumation and identification of war victims. His father was killed by the military forces, and his mother (Emma Dib) hides truths from him and refuses to participate in the trial against the murderers. One morning, an old indigenous woman called Nicolasa (Aurelia Caal) arrives and asks him to exhume her husband, Mateo, who was murdered and buried in a common grave in the countryside. Believing to find a trace of his dead father in that group of victims, Ernesto travels to Nicolasa's town, where he discovers that the grave is on private property. Back in the capital city, the remains of his father suddenly appear.

Here starts a narrative imbalance, since Díaz sets Nicolasa's drama aside until the end, and concentrates on the past of Ernesto's parents, on his mother's anguish, on revelations and determinations that the exhumation provoked. Díaz did not work a way to harmonize both stories, through a better editing structure, that would not leave the Mayan old woman out of the picture, until the final shots. If such were the structure of the script, perhaps an alternate montage could have balanced it a bit. However, this structure does not detract from the story, nor does brief moments in Dib's performance, who turns highly theatrical, passing it on to Espitia in declamatory moments.

«Nuestras madres» is a film that marks contrasts and incites comparisons: a small, intimate film, about the dispossessed classes and the Guatemalan left, with a certain documentary tone that increases the impact of Mayan and mestizo mothers' suffering, it is also an achievement infinitely superior to Bustamante's «La llorona », a sensationalist drama set among the Guatemalan upper middle class, with old-fashioned horror film resources and an inopportune legendary character as metaphor of the grieving Mayan mothers. A laudatory welcome to César Díaz to the ranks of Central American filmmaking,