Mark Reviews Movies: OUR MOTHERS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 30, 2020

Through the intimacy of its story and its filmmaking, Our Mothers reveals a world and decades of grief, pain, and trauma. The film is the narrative feature debut of writer/director Cesar Diaz, a Guatemalan filmmaker who taps into the horrific history of his country's 36-year civil war to reveal the depths of the conflict's wounds upon the population.

For some brief background, the civil war in Guatemala last from 1960 to 1996, after a 1954 military coup—backed by the United States—against the democratically elected government led to a series of autocratic leaders. In 1960, a group of rebels revolted against the standing dictator's government and, two years later, an American company that held sway over large swathes of land in the country.

The CIA and U.S. military got involved in training the government forces against these guerilla tactics. As is the almost inevitable horror of right-wing autocracy, the Guatemalan government started looking to spread the blame, incite terror, and violently rid themselves of any opposition. Their targets were not only the rebels. They were also the Maya, who initially supported the guerilla fighters, and the peasants, who would have seen some form of economic liberation in the goals of the rebels.

The end result was genocide. An estimated 200,000 people were killed or were disappeared by the government, and the majority of them were members of Mayan people.

This broader context is important to note, because, while the story of the film takes place in 2018 (five years after one of those dictators was found guilty by a court in his own country of genocide and crimes against humanity—a historical first, by the way), its primary concerns are with the past. It's also important to point out this history for American audiences, if only because we have a tendency to ignore such inconvenient errors—to put it euphemistically—of own government. The people of Guatemala have lived with this avoidable tragedy for 60 years now, and we have learned so little about it that we don't even possess the capacity to forget.

It's also important to note the historical context of the civil war because Diaz assumes the audience's knowledge of it. Those unfamiliar with the subject matter will learn what they need to know quickly. The background of the story is another trial, against a group of soldiers. On TV and radio news reports, the essential information comes through loudly and clearly: The government ordered the mass slaughter of unarmed and innocent civilians, and the unseen men on trial executed those orders with cruel and ruthless efficiency.

Listening to those reports, whenever he isn't investigating the decades' old crimes, is Ernesto (Armando Espitia), a forensic anthropologist working for an organization that finds mass graves and tries to re-unite the murdered with their families. The first shots of Diaz's film are overhead segments of a skeleton, lying on a table and being assembled by Ernesto. When he arrives at the skull, he puts a pencil through two holes—one in the front and one in the back—forming the straight line of a bullet's trajectory.

Diaz's initial approach to this material is mostly procedural. The film follows Ernesto, as he assembles skeletons, looks through files, puts information into his computer, and visits a cemetery (just outside the dilapidated buildings of an apartment complex, visually giving us the details of how the impoverished were specific targets of the government during the conflict), where victims' bodies were unceremoniously buried in a mass grave.

There's an entire room, adjacent to Ernesto and his co-worker's central workspace, that is filled with cardboard boxes. Each and every one is filled with human remains. We see the workers packing those boxes. We see them emptying the bones on to those slabs. The film's final series of shots makes the process so clear and so devastating—bones into boxes, boxes stacked upon and lined up next to each other, one victim after another after another, and, then, another grave with more bones to be packed and boxes to be stacked and remains to be assembled.

The procedural approach is somehow more heartbreaking than one might imagine. Ernesto meets with the widow of one identified victim and, in his official capacity, can only offer the most basic decency: The remains were treated with respect, and it might be better if the woman looked at them when she home surrounded by people.

A story eventually reveals itself. A woman named Nicolasa (Aurelia Caal) arrives at Ernesto's office after a long trek from a small village. She knows her husband—"my Mateo," she still calls him 36 years after his death—is buried in a mass grave just outside the village. She knows, because the soldiers made her and the other women dig the hole, after the men, suspected and actual rebels, were tortured for hours in the local school building. She has lived with death for decades, and now, she no longer can.

A photo reveals that Ernesto's father, a rebel fighter, might be buried in the same grave. His mother Cristina (Emma Dib) wants him to leave the past alone. He cannot, so he goes looking for the remains of a father he never knew—but whom he hopes his work and his very existence honor.

There are two central threads here: the mystery of the fate of Ernesto's father and an almost documentary-like examination of the personal cost of the war. In both, Diaz implements close-ups to tremendous effect, such as during those scenes in which Ernesto must explain his findings or question a survivor, with their faces recalling past pain and registering the idea of finally being able to bury a loved one. The gradual realization, of course, is that we're almost certainly watching real people who are survivors of the conflict. In that village, Diaz's camera just observes their faces—wrinkled and cemented into visages of unthinkable melancholy.

The faces haunt us, but Ernesto's story, at least, gives us some hope, despite how it reveals difficult truths that have been hidden even before he was born. Our Mothers is about those truths of trauma and mourning, but it's also about the fight for those truths to transform into justice. In Ernesto's story, Diaz argues a powerful thesis: The drive for such fundamental virtues is neither born of blood nor learned. It is innate.

Note: Outsider Pictures is making Our Mothers available via a virtual theatrical release. You can choose to support a local independent theater (e.g., the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago) with your rental purchase. The ticket price will be split equally with the theater. For more information and to access the film, click here. Participating theaters are listed on the page.

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