Guatemala opens film exhibition on Central American identity

Guatemala City, September 14 (EFE). A group of filmmakers inaugurated this Tuesday the Central American Film Festival on the identity of the nation and the region in celebration of the bicentenary of the independence of the Spanish Crown.

With five feature films and five short films in the same number of days, the gallery seeks to help understand the complex political, historical, human rights, racial, and artistic realities of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica through the lens of five diverse directors and creators.

The festival, created by the Imaginaries Collective, has been supported by the Spanish Cooperation Agency, the Spanish Cultural Center, Da Vinci University (private), the Casa Comal Film School and the Guatemalan Ministry of Culture and Sports.

“This is a commitment to dialogue, to confront ourselves as a society in the mirror of our own narratives, in terms of how we see ourselves and how we construct ourselves as social groups,” the organizing committee said.

Programming began with the documentary film La Asfixia, by Guatemalan director Ana Bustamante, released in 2018, which talks about the disappearance in 1982 of the director’s father, Emil Bustamante, in the midst of armed conflict (1960-1996) in the Central American country.

On Wednesdays, the exhibition will also present the Battle of the Volcano (2018), by Salvadoran Julio Lopez Fernandez, who in this documentary recounts step-by-step the final battle of the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992), narrated by guerrilla and military heroes.

By day, who said fear? (2010), by Honduran Katja Lara, in the 2009 coup d’état against former President Manuel Zelaya.

In addition, the Nicaraguan documentary Antolojología de Carl Rigby (2019) directed by Nicaraguan Maria José Alvarez and Guatemalan Eduardo Spiegler, who died in that country in a social outbreak in April 2018 against the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario, will be shown on Friday. Be available.

The feature film features the work of Carl Rigby, an oral poet from the Nicaraguan Caribbean.

Cinema and Identity culminates on Saturday with the Costa Rican film El Mito Blanco (2020), about the hidden indigenous people of Costa Rica and represented by Nicaraguan director Gabriel Serra Arguelo.

The exhibition presented the works free of charge and virtual throughout each of the days allocated to each production, in addition to the forums transmitted over the Internet. EFE

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