Discoveries from Guatemala World Cinema

Guatamalan Garifuna woman Arisa is a singer and dancer. When her voice fails, help can be found in the ocean, her mother, and the vision of her late grandmother.

Some Christmas decorations learn a lesson about discrimination.

A short method film about a stream gone wrong involving a female video game streamer and her interviewee.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan writer, depicts a dream about cells in trees in a short story. Years later, he discovers an internment camp in the jungle of his native Guatemala, a camp that embodies this unsettling idea, brought to life by a doctor.

The artist's shadow becomes the target of a violent act directed against the self, staged using a 9mm pistol. Regina José Galindo confronts the expression "to fear even one's own shadow", a metaphor for constant exposure to danger and the need for self-defense that permeates female experience, in Guatemala and beyond. The gesture condenses into an image of striking intensity, almost a cinematic flash, whose immediacy conveys the sense of a threat that is always present.

Two Mayan Tz'utujil brothers who decide to rob gas stations on the Panamerican Highway to pay extortion fees from gangs and the hospital debt they owe for their father, who tested positive for Covid-19.

The Maya Mam invite you to celebrate with them as we follow Jun Kanek who’s getting ready to participate in a traditional ceremony honouring his people.

Blue Abstraction 2012 is a single-channel video with sound of a performance by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. Shot in a continuous take that lasts just under six and a half minutes, it shows a young man standing motionless by a dirt road in the middle of a landscape. He is approached by the artist who carries with him a can of blue paint and paintbrush. He applies paint in broad brushstrokes across the clothes and body of the man until his entire form is covered. The video ends with the artist walking away and the figure continuing to stand still. Ramírez-Figueroa’s use of blue paint is a reference to the history of early black and white cinema, which utilised the tendency for the film stock to turn blue objects white by covering figures in the colour to create the impression that they had disappeared.

A lepidoptera, when studying butterflies, will realize that its relationships and butterflies have something in common

A terrifying conversation plays on the radio, while a listener is disturbed.

Luna (15) desecrates graves in the cemetery where she lives with her father César (55) who works as a caretaker there. She sells the valuables he finds in the tombs. The day César goes to his doctor's appointment for his arthritis in his knees, Luna desecrates graves again, but runs into the new guard dog they have at the cemetery in the morning.

An experimental film, black and white 16 mm film, made specifically to be submitted to the Ann Arbor Film Festival depicting a life drawing class where the model is dressed and the students are naked. This is Luis Argueta’s first black and white16 mm film. It includes an elaborate sound design by Joe Pearson. Argueta says that “the film was admitted to the Ann Arbor Film Festival, it was selected for the tour of campuses the festival puts together every year where each film received $1 per minute every time it was projected. My film was 7 min long and it must have been shown at least 43 times because I made back my $300 investment. It was the only time I ever made back the money I put into making a film. But it was the first time I felt I could express myself and invent something new and unique.” The title is a fake apology.

When COVID-19 forced his school to close and remote learning proved impossible, a teacher in Guatemala built a classroom on wheels to bring education directly to his students.

At El Portal, an iconic bar in Guatemala City's historic center, a poet from the generation that nearly changed the country's destiny in the 1970s surrenders to drunkenness and disillusionment, to the rhythm of a cleaning worker's routine. Based on an idea by Sergio Valdés and "In memory of our absent poets," this short film bears witness to the cinematic gaze in the postwar period. Starring Francisco de León and Mario Recinos.

Plot under wraps.

After surviving the threat that almost wipes the entire human race, a couple struggles to maintain their relationship without destroying each other after the unwelcome visit of a stranger.

Ale dances to heal but Checha has not yet found the means to get better. In an attempt to help him and move on Ale gets accidentally locked up with Checha on a terrace. Without much to say, dance will be their only language.

During the 1980s the Guatemalan army launched ruthless counter-insurgency campaigns against indigenous communities, killing or displacing thousands. This film documents the struggle of a group of Maya-Q’eqchi’ villages to reconstruct their communities and come to terms with their violent past.

Voice of a Mountain is a video documentary of the lives of rural Guatemalan coffee farmers who took up arms against their government in a civil war that lasted 36 years. This documentary explores Guatemala's dark history from the perspective of those who saw armed revolution as their only hope for change in a poverty-ridden nation under years of military dictatorship. Ex-combatants talk about the bleak reality of the country that led to their involvement in the war, and the response of genocide from the Guatemalan government against its people. The documentary gives insight into their motives for joining an armed conflict as interviews reveal personal accounts of struggle, hope, tragedy, and the fruits of their resistance. The signing of the Peace Accords between the Guatemalan Government and Guerrilla forces in 1996 officially ended the longest civil war in Latin American history. Voice of a Mountain documents the reality of rural Guatemala in the wake of the civil war.

On her 90th birthday, Josefa Elizabeth Andrade reflects on the chapel she built for her son, Joaquín Rodas Andrade, forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s armed conflict nearly forty years ago.

In the mountains, where the river sings its resistance, Ixquic walks amidst the shadows of an uncertain future. She rejects the stories her mother weaves as threads of life, until the river weeps blood, and the fire of truth awakens.

A teenager has a project due, but starts working on it the night before and begins to have a crisis because he doesn't know what to do and because of the lack of sleep.

An undocumented immigrant recounts memories of his childhood home while telling the story of the handmade wallet tied to his journey across the border.

The spectral takes embodied form in Regina José Galindo’s ongoing performance series Aparición, which stages veiled figures in public spaces as transient monuments to victims of femicide. Cloaked in weighted fabric, the figures operate within what Deleuze might call a folded temporality, collapsing past and present into a shared plane of urgency, interrogating the structures of monumentality and remembrance. In her essay A Threatening Presence, writer Georgia Phillips-Amos argues “rather than commemorate or memorialize lives past, Galindo’s Aparición follows Judith Butler’s definition of spectre as ‘foreclosed and yet surviving’. Their time is ours, and vice-versa”. Galindo’s work thus establishes a presence in place. Returning again to Barnett, “Yet within the hollow of the fold, and despite its closure, a leap may still be possible: not a leap elsewhere…but rather leaping in place…and thus distorting or displacing the ground (the foundation, or its unfounding)”.

In the heat of Palín, Escuintla, Rebeca struggles to enjoy a vacation overshadowed by her mother's constant presence. Through small acts of rebellion, she begins to break away from her submissive attitude in search of her own identity.

René, a bus driver in Guatemala faces gang extortion while struggling to protect his son. Desperation leads him to take extreme measures to safeguard what he loves most.

Four Paths to Dignity profiles the pursuit of dignity for Guatemalan midwives. The midwives confront challenges, as they battle racism and a health establishment that strives to prevent them from providing care that is culturally appropriate. Although the midwives provide important services to their communities, they are opposed by a government that seeks to eliminate their practice. This film reveals their activism and their struggle to gain recognition by the medical establishment.

A renowned doctor faces an ethical dilemma when a patient with an overdose is admitted to the emergency room; he faces the choice of saving the patient or taking justice into his own hands to make him pay for a crime he committed.

From night to dawn, Ramírez-Figueroa holds a shrouded block of ice until it melts to create a ‘blanket that could weep.’ This performance was made after the death of the artist’s brother and can be seen as a reflection of the high mortality rate of children in Guatemala as a result of the Civil War. He stands in the passageway of General Cemetery in Guatemala City, where burial plots can be rented if people cannot afford to buy a plot - suggesting that for some, even these places of rest are temporary.

"Regina José Galindo’s Tierra (2013) explores connections between the exploitation of labor, resources, and human life in Guatemala. Presented at a larger-than-life scale, Galindo stands naked on a parcel of land that is excavated by an encroaching bulldozer. Conjuring imagery of machine-dug mass graves, the work draws attention to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people, mostly Maya Ixil, during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96). As the excavator digs around her, the artist stands fixed and unrelenting." - MoMA PS1

Reis, a driving instructor at the “Closhi Freno” academy, is scammed when buying his first vehicle, after saving tirelessly and without knowing it he is enrolled in a car race on which the future of his job will depend. His mechanic friends, Wheely and Kerso, and his partner in the driving academy, Silvina, will do everything possible to ensure that he does not give up despite the terrible condition of the car and his inexperience in racing. A fun film with the familiar and healthy humor that characterizes Bambuchia Producciones with a deep message about friendship, integrity, perseverance and the value of people.

Mayan conceptual artist Benvenuto Chavajay prepares his most recent performance. His odyssey begins at his exhibition in Paris' Pompidou Centre, passes through the streets of Guatemala City, until it arrives in the heart of the tz'utujil land of San Pedro La Laguna.

Trapped in a toxic relationship, Marcos discovers the effort it takes to heal and move forward.

Through a log, Chaim tells us the story of filming, where, without wanting to, she faces the violence that many once experienced. Verónica, a midwife with whom she strikes up a friendship, opens a place for her to tell what her body told her with tears. A tour of the places where they were able to heal and be reborn together, putting silence aside and naming the unspeakable.

A hotel manager must orchestrate a flawless experience for a family of potential buyers, all while dealing with room issues, bad smells - and a masked killer.

Print of Sleep 2016 is a is a single-channel video with sound of a durational performance by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. Edited down to a little under eighteen minutes for the video, the performance was originally presented at the sixth edition of the biennial event If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam in 2016 and again at KunstWerke in Berlin, where this video was filmed. It depicts a predominantly empty white room with a number of bare metal-framed beds with wire-mesh supports, some double-tiered, and lit underneath by fluorescent tubes that are placed across the space.

Isa has just run away from home and heads to a forest where she meets Carla, an old friend. As the two friends make their way through the woods, Carla notices something strange about Isa's attitude.

An invisible narrator speaks (without temporal notion) about the reminiscences that evoke in him an introspective journey through memory, therefore, through pain. A short film about romance, and like every romantic piece, written from remembrence. A tear. My cinematic self portrait.

A physicist whose father was murdered during the Guatemalan civil war. In an attempt to reconnect with his father's energy he becomes obsessed with finding a way to measure Karma through spacetime. Through his journey it becomes clear that the only way to find his father is to just let go.

Gerardi is a Guatemalan film produced by the Human Rights Office of the Archbishopric of Guatemala and Moralejas films. It starred Jimmy Morales and depicts the most difficult moments of the Guatemalan civil war in the department of Quiché, when villages are being attacked and razed and the Catholic Church is being intimidated and forced to take sides. Monsignor Gerardi is bishop in that department, one of the departments of the Republic most affected by violence. His homilies then become public denunciations and he is forced to go into exile despite having the support of the Archbishop of Guatemala, Próspero Penados del Barrio.

'Ixoq' ('Woman' in Kaqchikel-the local Mayan language) A young Guatemalan mother dreams of a better future for her son, when an organization (Konojel) fighting malnutrition opens its doors, allowing her to support her family and become a role model to the women in her community.

Katerin Ixtabalan, her Guatemalan family and a large community of immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona fight against an uncertain future in the US .

Tomacorriente, by Sergio Valdés Pedroni, is a history of urban rock in Guatemala; an audio and visual journey through five decades (1973–2023) of rebellion, influences, abuses, and artistic creation. The film begins as a tribute to Marco Antonio Luna, founder of the group Cuerpo y Alma, and becomes a polyphonic, independent feature film that revisits the clichés of national rock from the margins. It is a raw and honest tribute to the creative impulse of young people who found a way to express themselves through rock music.

An unfinished short film that, at the dawn of contemporary Guatemalan cinema, offered a raw look at the circumstances of marginalized urban youth.