The fiction feature directorial debut of the Guatemalan filmmaker César Díaz is a modestly scaled picture with massive implications. Díaz’s background is in editing, and there’s a strong documentary component in his filmography. So it’s fitting that in this picture the protagonist is a forensic anthropologist — one who is working on a project that goes back decades rather than centuries, which is usually what we see in movies featuring anthropologists.
The movie opens with Ernesto, the young anthropologist (Armando Espitia), in a dimly-lit room, one you might see in a lab or a morgue, laying out bones on a table until a human skeleton takes shape. Díaz shoots and edits this process to put across a sense of quietude and patience, emphasizing process.
Ernesto is part of a team investigating massacres from the 1980s, amid Guatemala’s long civil war. The movie is set in 2018, when the perpetrators of such atrocities were being brought to account for their actions. Ernesto is not just looking for justice, he’s trying to find the father he believes was a guerrilla and a victim of a mass killing in a village. In one scene, a few of the characters watch a television documentary in which a narrator notes, “Military command regarded the whole population as the enemy.” Men were killed, women were imprisoned, subjugated and raped, and now the killing fields are mass graveyards, each one a place where Ernesto’s investigative team must acquire discrete permission to dig up.
“If you cannot separate your life from your work, we cannot keep you here,” one of Ernesto’s supervisors warns after the anthropologist’s intrusive questioning of one older woman. Because it was often only the women who were left alive in these villages, Ernesto and his team must rely on their often reluctant testimony. His own tunnel vision doesn’t quite blind him to their continuing courage, but it does lead him to construct a narrative that will unravel by the movie’s end.
In the meantime, Ernesto’s mother (Emma Dib), who seems of two minds about her son’s quest, is preparing to testify before a tribunal. Her friends and comrades are intellectuals who still like to sing “The Internationale” at gatherings. There’s a strong sense that such activities are akin to whistling in the dark. The ambivalent, uncertain present of the movie can’t separate itself from the legacy of death that Ernesto and his colleagues keep uncovering.
Díaz’s approach is plain and solid, like a well-built wooden chair before varnishing. The revelations of the story are often ghastly, but “Our Mothers” doesn’t go for the emotional jugular. Near the end there’s a montage of the faces of many poor women; most of them are on the precipice dividing middle and old age but they all look practically eternal in the way their features express, without trying, vast reservoirs of pain and fortitude. Díaz presents them, and leaves the rest in the laps of the viewers. Their moment in world history may be, as far as some are concerned, past. But the implicit question here is still pertinent: Which side are you on?
Our Mothers
Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on ROW8.com.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
