Nuestras madres

This film held ones interest even though some of the scenes were a bit weak and non-contributory. There isn't a lot of context provided for people who are unfamiliar with this civil war, but for those who have knowledge of it, it makes sense. The film is great for capturing the faces of the women who suffered during that period as well as the losses suffered by the young guerillas. It cannot be an easy task to look faces of the military in the eyes, knowing what some people had to endure at their hands. It's worth the watch since, unlike many independently produced, low-budget films from Latin America, this one actually comes together at the end. There are no loose ends.

Its important to watch movies like this to remember that this war against the people was partly funded by American dollars but very few people knew or cared that it was going on. Apparently that is still true. The young man is helping his people because he has lived that tragedy and because he feels for the women who have lost everything. His mother went through unbearable torture and survived. That's what this film is about, the survival of the women and the difficult investigations to find the bones of their families. Anyone who gave it low reviews because it lacked a story has not lived through tragedy now do they want to hear about it.

After seeing 'La llorona', the Guatemalan submission for the upcoming foreign language Oscar, I decided to check out 'Nuestras Madres', which hit the cinemas earlier this year. Both films have the same subject: the aftermath of the cruel civil war in Guatemala. 'Nuestras Madres' was submitted for the Oscars last year by Belgium. This is the country where Guatemala-born director Cesar Diaz lives after he moved there as a student.

'Nuestras Madres' didn't win an Oscar, but it did win numerous other awards. It tells the story about the civil war by showing the search of a young Guatemalan for his father, who died in the war. The young man is an investigator for the government, taking care of the remains of dead bodies found in mass graves throughout the country. This is shown by some strong scenes. The opening scene, for instance, shows a human skeleton being assembled. It is shot vertically down from high above, so that all emphasis is on the skeleton. Another highlight is the sequence of indigenous women in a remote village who are being interviewed by the investigator. Instead of showing the interviews, Diaz lets each woman gaze straight into the camera for a prolonged period. Their eyes and faces tell the story, instead of their words.

In between the stronger scenes, the story sometimes falls a bit flat. The cinematography is straightforward, and the screenplay could have benefited from a bit more spice. Only in the last part of the film, the story gets a boost from some authentic emotional moments that grip the viewer. Compared to 'La llorona', this is more of a conventional film, with sometimes a documentary feel to it. Both films try to shed light on a very disturbing period in Guatemalan history. They do it in different ways, so that they perfectly complement each other.

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,

Greetings again from the darkness. Every war is ugly and devastating, and few lasted as long as the Civil War in Guatemala, which ended in 1996 after many years and many deaths. Its history tracks back to the early 1960's, and the fighting between the government and various leftist rebel groups was violent, resulting in more than 200,000 deaths (mostly Mayan) in the 1970's and 80's. In his first narrative feature, writer-director Cesar Diaz chose not to examine the causes of war, but rather the fallout ... the tattered lives left in its wake.

Armando Espitia stars as Ernesto, a young anthropologist at the Forensic Foundation - an institute that specializes in locating, identifying, and carefully packaging the remains of the casualties of war. It's 2018, and the news reports we overhear call this an "historic moment", as war criminals are brought to trial. The film opens on Ernesto as he is assembling the skeletal remains taken from a mass burial site that the Institute was recently permitted to excavate. We soon learn that Ernesto has his own personal mission - finding out what happened to his father, who is identified only as a guerilla fighter. Ernesto's mother (Emma Dib), with whom he lives, discourages him from searching for his dad. He states 'I need to know', while she says 'I don't wish to remember.'

Director Diaz includes a gut-wrenching sequence of women in a local village. It's almost like a series of photographs ... a lineup of local woman who are victims of the war. The work of cinematographer Virginie Surdej is extraordinary in this sequence. These aren't actors, but rather natives to the area - women whose weathered faces show the story being told by the movie. They lead Ernesto to a mass grave on private land where many of the slaughtered men and children are buried. The atrocities toward the women were often worse than death, and now they are going about living, fully aware that their loved ones never received the respect in death that is so valued.

Ernesto takes statements from the women, and is so devoted to finding his father that his social life consists of sleeping in his car and fantasizing about the local bartender. Ernesto and the women, who are the face of war, are simply looking for closure. They want dignity for the dead, and he wants to know his roots. There is much family pain and pride, and often when family secrets gets solved, the result is more pain than relief. Director Diaz was born in Guatemala and delivers a mostly quiet film that is only 78 minutes in run time, but its message rings loud and clear ... the horrors of war don't end when the war does. The film was a multi-award winner at Cannes, and justifiably so.