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hIt’s a thoughtful, understated drama about one of the bloodiest periods in a long time civil war in guatemala, fought between US-backed right-wing generals and left-wing rebels. In the 1980s, thousands of men, women and children were killed, mostly by soldiers. Our Mothers begins as a simple drama about families, decades later, still searching for relatives who disappeared in the massacres. But what emerges is a sensitive and moving portrait of female survivors – the clue is in the title.
In 2018, Ernesto (Armando Espitia) is a hard-working young government forensic scientist. Director Cesar Díaz follows Ernesto in a low-key documentary style as the young man goes about his business, finding mass graves and exhuming bodies. One day, an indigenous woman, Nicolasa (Aurelia Kaal), enters his office with a familiar story: more than 30 years ago, soldiers tortured and killed the men in her farming village, then raped the women. Diaz handles the sexual assault narratives with extreme sensitivity, not giving away more information than is necessary.
Nicolasa has a photo of her husband posing with guerrillas who visited their village shortly before the army attacked. Ernesto believes that one of the men in the photo may be his father, a guerrilla who disappeared at the time. At home, his mother Christina (Emma Dibb), a pediatrician, is silent. The past is in the past; she doesn’t want to know. On her birthday, old comrades and intellectuals sing left-wing hymns. A friend is about to testify in the trial of a former soldier accused of rape, but Christina has apparently refused to testify.
Between 1960 and 1996, more than 100,000 Guatemalan women were raped. A more traditional “problem” drama would have a big confrontation between mother and son, but here it plays out on a lower note, in a humane film that has a deep respect for the real-life survivors.
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