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I have this one on DVD cause I bought it at a book fair years ago. I watched it then and was not impressed. Today, it rang a little different due to the political undertones happening in Guatemala. It does a good job of telling a coming-of-age story in the middle of such a tumultuous political event as was Arbenz' coup d'etat.

Neto is not a particularly interesting character and I think that's where the film fails to connect. In fact, the only interesting character is the uncle because he's the only one bringing much needed conflict into the plot and giving Neto that push to come out of his shell. This is, again, another one of those films you should watch if you want to get invested in Guatemalan film history, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.

Näskara tells the story of María, an indigenous woman, who is seeking justice following the rape of her sister, Rosa, by her boss' son.

Being one of the earliest Guatemalan films in history, as well as the first one to compete at Cannes, I was intrigued to check it out. It's amazing to me how the themes it deals with are still prevalent in today's society. The misogyny, not believing the victims, how the system fails to obtain justice. I was surprised that a short film from this era would feature such a female-centric story. This movie is fully about Maria's journey from Santiago, Atitlán through Panajachel, Sololá, all the way to the capital city where she is met by the Revolution of 1944.

Overall, I enjoyed it from a historical and cultural perspective. It has its issues of course, like how the men are all evil caricatures. There's very little nuance to the characters, but I appreciate what was attempted and the final product we see on the screen.

Heart-wrenching to think about how the streets of our country are stained with blood and how many people will never be found and the many families that will never have closure. The unseen footage shared from those times in this documentary, along with the powerful testimony of the survivors makes it a must-see for anyone interested in deep-diving into this dark part of our history. My only gripe is that we're never told how Carlos survived. His story was such a focal point of this piece and I don't feel like it was resolved for the viewer.

Stories like these need to be told and kept alive for future generations, so I will say that it's a shame that this documentary didn't get the exposure that it deserved. Aside from a couple of screenings back in 2021 (which I couldn't attend), it's really impossible to access it.

1991 is about a kid from a poor neighborhood named Daniel who in an effort to be friends with the rich kids starts to lie about where he lives, his upbringing and he also starts ditching his best friend, who is of the same social status as him. The twist here is that the rich kids go on rampages looking for the poor kids to beat them up with metal baseball bats.

From the moment he starts ditching his best friend you can predict the ending of this movie. Not to mention you don't get any kind of resolution by the time the credits roll. No real introspection on social and class relations, what motivates them. It's like the synopsis says, "They don't know why they do it" and the movie doesn't know either.

Also, adults and parents don't exist in this movie. It's like they're conveniently out of the picture because the filmmakers were too lazy to write them into the plot. There are only two instances of parents being mentioned, but they're never on screen.

I know the film had budget issues, but the way they cut corners ultimately hurt the movie. The film is too short, too rushed, too predictable, too underveloped, and horrendously edited. The film feels like it ends half an hour before it's supposed to.

The fact that it took three people to write this one-hour and 10 minute unresolved mess is beyond me. I really want to support Guatemalan cinema, but movies like these make it extremely difficult.

El Apostolado is a film about a priest who goes through a few moral dilemmas in his path of helping people. The main issue with the film is that the main character's motivations are not made clear. We never find out if he's in love with Esmeralda or just feels sorry for her, or with the other woman, Inés. It is never clear if he's sexually attracted to her. The problem is that his interactions with these two women are at the center of the plot, so by not exploring these relationships on a deeper level the film leaves a lot of loose ends by the end because at some point in the film Esmeralda goes missing and he never finds her and we never find out what happens to her either. Was she a victim of femicide? Did she run away? It also makes no sense for him to be so adamant about helping Inés unless he's sexually attracted to her since she's literally a conceited rich woman who's just discontent with her life, but when she tries to seduce him, he rejects her advances. In the final scene he packs up his stuff, takes off the priest attire and is seen entering a strip joint or bar of some sort, clearly implying he's leaving the priesthood behind, but what was the point of him being a priest in the first place? I thought at some point the plot twist would be that he was just pretending to be a priest, but nothing really happened that shed any light on these questions.

Plot issues aside, the film also makes some really questionable artistic choices. In a lot of scenes, the film uses this exposition gimmick where each new character the protagonist meets during the film is introduced with a shot of the character in black and white standing against a white backdrop with a lengthy and unnecessary voiceover in which he tells us their name and backstory about them. He does this even with minor characters that ultimately serve no major purpose for the plot. There's no justification as to why the audience needs to know these things about the characters or why they are even relevant.

The other issue I had is with the score. The jazzy score they used doesn't fit the movie at all. Ultimately the only reason I didn't give it 1 star is because the cinematography was quite competent for a small independent movie, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

As a gay man from Guatemala, this film spoke to me on several levels. The way the main character of Jose has to sneak out of his job to hook up with men because he lives with his mom is 100% accurate. Every gay man in Guatemala city knows the kind of sleazy motels he visits downtown in the city with the guys he hooks up with.

Although the cultural elements of the film were very truthful and real, the plot itself didn't feel fully developed. The film is too short, and the relationship between José and Luis didn't feel real to me. It was a mixture of bad acting with the film rushing the relationship. The issue of him being gay and living with an overtly religious mother is not explored either. There is also a generic subplot about a straight couple that contributes nothing to the main plot. Overall, the film lacked conflict, it was very low stakes and the ending was uneventful.

I would recommend you watch it if you're gay and from Guatemala because it is refreshing to see us represented in this fashion, but much like Temblores by Jayro Bustamante, these Guatemalan LGBTQ+ movies are still treading very cautiously around these topics and don't pack the punch that a film about being gay in a homophobic third world country should.

The filmmakers and actors are desperately trying to act like white people and think shooting films in English with foreigners on Guatemalan land is going to get them seen in the US. Ixcanul from that same year does a much better job of displaying Guatemala and its people than this whitewashed movie does.

Not the first film by this filmmaker that is done primarily in English and with white actors, despite being a "Guatemalan" movie. A total cultural disconnect that is quite embarrassing to watch.

I had high expectations for this movie as it generated a lot of buzz for winning the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, however, upon watching the movie you slowly realize that this film is not really about the indigenous mothers who fell victim to the Guatemalan armed conflict, but rather about a young man who works as an anthropologist that has a personal stake for helping these women who are searching for the remains of their loved ones. He only helps them because he is looking for the remains of his father, all while his own mother tries to deter him from searching for his father as she's keeping a secret from him.

The film is beautifully shot, there is a sequence where the the women are photographed while providing their testimonies which is beautiful, but as I stated previously, the film fails to amplify the voices that give it its title and it failed to do so because it was told through the wrong point of view. It reminds me a little bit of The Help and how Skeeter, a white woman, is the protagonist in a story about black maids suffering from racism. Here you have Ernesto, a male looking for his father's remains, taking center stage in what should be a story about the suffering of these women.

"Mi Padre" would've been a more appropriate title.

In Jayro Bustamante's third feature film, La Llorona, he reimagines the old legend of La Llorona to give it a social and political spin.

The film centers around a paranoid dictator named Enrique, who's based on former Guatemalan president Efraín Ríos Montt. The story really hits home on the subject of genocide and social class in Guatemala. It can he described as a downward spiral where all the characters descend into paranoia and madness and are forced to examine their own prejudices, guilts and shortcomings.

The cinematography is one of the strongest aspects of this movie. The film's gloomy and dark feel is perfectly captured by it, especially in the scenes where the dictator wanders around the house in the middle of the night and during the trial when the victims are testifying.

Maria Mercedes Coroy does an amazing job portraying Alma, "La Llorona", in this story. The creepy stares, the long hair covering her face, every detail is on point. My only issues are with some of the dialogue and acting. Some scenes have really forced and unnatural dialogue and actors like Sabrina de la Hoz and Margarita Kenéfic do not do a good job conveying it. Especially Sabrina, her performance consists on looking confused and worried for almost the entirety of the movie and the moments she speaks the line delivery is so flat. Kenéfic on the other hand, starts out the same way, but her character benefits from some great development that redeems her performance in the end.

Overall, the film does a great job portraying and how indigenous people in Guatemala were victimized by our leaders. Kudos to the filmmakers for daring to touch on these subjects. A lot of people in Guatemala are still scared to dive into these stories, so it's amazing to see it portrayed so bluntly on screen.

As a Guatemalan, it was very difficult for me to get invested in this short. All the actors are Mexican and they speak like Mexicans. Some of the dialogue even has Mexican slang which tells me the filmmakers didn't do their research about how Guatemalans actually talk or simply didn't care. I didn't even feel like I was watching a film taking place in Guatemala. It was borderline insulting and reinforces the stereotype that all latinos are the same regardless of their nationality.

I can't support this short due to the complete cultural disregard with which the filmmakers approached this tragedy. Please don't touch Guatemalan stories next time.

Temblores is the second full length feature film by Jayro Bustamante, following the much acclaimed Ixcanul from 2015.

The film follows Pablo, a married man with two children who comes out as gay and whose life begins to unravel as society rejects him and his evangelical family goes to great lengths to cure his homosexuality.

The story starts out strong, perhaps too strong. The issue with the first scene is that we are thrusted into the conflict without much context to make us care for the protagonist or any of the characters in the movie. The stakes are so high, but without much needed backstory or exposition to engage the audience before this event takes place the whole mood feels very premature.

The relationship between Pablo and his boyfriend, Francisco, lacks chemistry, they also come from very different social backgrounds and have very different beliefs. I would've liked for the movie to provide some backstory as to how they met and what made them fall in love, or at least provide this information through dialogue because I didn't buy it. There's also very little physical contact between them, which is not realistic for a gay couple living alone in an apartment.

Juan Pablo Olyslager and Sabrina de la Hoz deliver the strongest performances out of the cast. I also enjoyed the performances of the two kids. They are very well written, the way they rebel at not being able to see their father is heartbreaking and the dialogue they share is very well written. There isn't really a bad performance in the movie. The issue lies in the writing. All the characters in the movie function around the protagonist, they have no story arcs or motivations of their own. The lack of character development reduces all the supporting characters in the film, except for Francisco and the kids, to vile religious fanatics with zero redeeming qualities who will ruin Pablo's life as long as he's gay.

In conclusion, the film didn't know the right place to begin or the right place to end and the middle is a myriad of sequences that eventually lead nowhere. For a film to tackle such sensitive issues, I feel like it still walked on eggshells around them. I expected it to be more crude, more real, to go all in on these issues, but for a film called Temblores, I expected to be shaken to my core and it barely made me shiver.

Often times in Guatemala, you go watch a Guatemalan film solely for the sake of supporting your country. Ixcanul didn't feel that way, it is truly a film that transcends its origins and offers a story that feels universal. The story tackles topics such as agriculture, arranged marriages, pregnancy, among others. The film has a stunning cinematography and direction, which was quite impressive, some scenes do make use of the shaky camera method, which within context of what's happening in the film kind of make sense, however, they may feel a bit "out of place" considering the attention to detail that the rest of the film has.

Although all of the actors are debuting in this film, the acting is stellar, particularly from María Telón who commands the film and really delivers some of it's most powerful and emotionally effective scenes. In some instances, the actors don't need to speak for you to understand their feelings, almost like a silent picture. The Spanish-speaking actors are the only ones that I felt lacking, but their parts are minimal and are hardly detracting to the film.

Overall, Ixcanul is an eye-opener to people who are not familiar with the sad realities that the Kaqchikel people have to go through. It's the first film made in Guatemala that feels thought out, as well as culturally important and significant.