Our Mothers
Guatemala’s history of civil war and genocide is revisited in César Diaz’s moving drama.
We live in a world in which issues of genocide are regularly in the headlines but that is all the more reason for not allowing past instances of it to fade into history and to be forgotten. One person who feels that way is César Díaz. Having been born in Guatemala City in 1978 he grew up during the second half of the civil war that existed in his country from 1960 onwards. Many people went missing in those years and Díaz’s own father disappeared in 1981. Accordingly, it is no surprise that, having earlier worked as a film editor and having directed two medium-length documentaries, he should have turned to this subject matter for Our Mothers his first full feature and a work on which he is credited as both writer and director.
As part of that war the Guatemalan government was responsible in the early 1980s for a slaughter of the indigenous Mayan peoples which came to be recognised as genocide while in addition many activists and others critical of the government were also eliminated. Rather than tell a tale actually set in that period, Díaz, whose film dates from 2019, treated the theme through a contemporary tale. His central character is Ernesto González (Armando Espitia) who, at a time when the military forces who started the war are on trial, is a forensic investigator involved in finding and exhuming bodies many of which are located in unmarked mass graves. He also interviews those who come forward seeking help in this connection. The Mayan widow Nicolasa (Aurelia Caal) is one such. She describes her own suffering at the hands of the military (rape was no less prevalent than killing) and goes on to request that her husband's body be dug up and identified. Unexpectedly Nicolasa produces a photograph of her late husband which shows alongside him a guerrilla fighter whom Ernesto identifies as his own father. The latter in a fictional echo of Díaz’s own family history had disappeared in 1982. Ernesto's mother, Cristina (Emma Dib), seems less sure about this identification but, despite receiving no professional support for his action, Ernesto takes time off to travel with a colleague, Juan (Julio Serrano Echeverria), to visit Nicolasa’s village and to see if he can discover more.
While modest in length at 77 minutes, Our Mothers is very much a film of two parts. The first deals with the events that I have described and is handled with a direct simplicity that is very effective following on as it does from a hugely powerful and well-judged opening shot. The film is not one that involves flashbacks or goes into the detailed political history behind Guatemala’s civil war but what we learn has no trouble in speaking for itself. While Espitia and Dib are professional actors, many of the others, Caal among them, are not, but that enables Díaz to give us at one stage a memorable montage of elderly women lined up to give their testimonies to Ernesto and their authentic faces speak volumes.
However, after the scenes in Nicolasa’s village, the film returns to its urban setting and becomes a more personal drama. Earlier the storytelling has been a model of smoothness but the family narrative that takes over feels less adroit and clear cut even though it remains centred on what happened in 1982 and on Ernesto’s mother appearing as a witness at the court hearing concerned with the war crimes. One dramatic development feels akin to the kind of plot twist often found in melodramas and some of the subsidiary characters could be more clearly identified. It's also the case that, although Armando Espitia has been a very sympathetic leading figure, it is disconcerting to realise that the character he is playing is meant to be in his mid-thirties when the actor looks so very much younger. Ironically, I discovered afterwards that Espitia is indeed 33 years old but you would never guess it so the issue remains.
Nevertheless, even if this film is far more sure-footed in its first half than in its second, this is an honourable venture undertaken with sensitivity and it fulfils its aim of maintaining full awareness of a genocide and of what it has meant - and continues to mean - to those who have lived through it and still survive today.
Original title: Nuestras madres.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Armando Espitia, Emma Dib, Aurelia Caal, Julio Serrano Echeverria, Victor Moreira, Patricia Orantes Córdova, Thelma Sarceño, Maria Salomé Simón.
Dir César Diaz, Pro Géraldine Sprimont and Delphine Schmit, Screenplay César Diaz, Ph Virginie Surdej, Art Dir Pilar Peredo, Ed Damien Maestraggi, Music Rémi Boubal, Costumes Beatriz Lantán and Sofia Lantán.
Need Productions/Perspective Films/Proximus/Ciné Concepción-Peccadillo Pictures.
77 mins. Belgium/France/Guatemala. 2019. UK Rel: 10 May 2024. Cert. 15.
