The sad beginnings of Guatemalan cinema
It was an operator employed by the Lumière brothers who first brought the cinematograph to Guatemala in 1897. The first Guatemalan film was made in 1905, focusing on the capital's festivities. During the first half of the twentieth century, cinema was a tool of the State, heavily impacted by censorship and restrictions on freedom of expression. There were few, if any, national productions, and the same applied to cinemas. It wasn't until 1950 that the first feature-length sound film saw the light of day, under the title El sombrerón. Directed by Guillermo Andreu and Eduardo Fleischman, this film transposed to the screen the popular myth of El Sombrerón, the Guatemalan bogeyman who terrorized children on the nights of the full moon, hiding under a large black hat and making his boots clack and his guitar sing. This black-and-white work can now be discovered online.
Unfortunately, the years of civil war paralyzed almost all of the country's film industry, leaving only a few co-productions with Mexico, still subject to censorship. Nevertheless, a few national filmmakers managed to bring their films to the screen, such as Manuel Zecena Diéguez and his films L'amour dans les nuages (1968), Une femme pour le samedi (1970) and Derrière cette porte (1975). It wasn't until the 1990s, and the peace accords of 1996, that the country's filmmakers were once again able to create without hindrance. The first to make a name for himself was Luis Argueta with Neto's Silence (1994). The first Guatemalan film to delve into the country's tumultuous past, this tale of a young man's life in the face of the 1954 coup d'état was also Guatemala's first submission to the Academy Awards.
Filming and international productions
In parallel with this complex national situation, Guatemala was also a playground for Hollywood and international cinema, and an object of fascination for Westerners. As early as the 1910s, we saw productions such as The Planter (1917), the story of a young man sent to manage a plantation in a country where a special destiny awaited him. Or Adventure Girl (1934), the adventures of a girl and her father who set off in search of a lost treasure and end up in the clutches of a Mayan princess. A number of documentary filmmakers also set down their cameras in Guatemala between the wars, such as James A. FitzPatrick, who shot several of his Travel Talks there. Around the same period, The New Adventures of Tarzan took Bruce Bennett's character into the Guatemalan jungle and over the pyramids of the cities of Quirigua and Tikal, before placing him in the foothills of Volcán de Agua and then on the shores of Lake Atitlán. Many of the country's other towns and cities are also represented in the film, such as Puerto Barrios and Chichicastenango, although these urban landscapes have changed considerably since 1935. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Tikal site continued to be exploited by Hollywood, first in Star Wars (1977) as the fourth moon of Yavin, on which rebels attempt to escape the Empire, and then in Moonraker (1979). James Bond - played in this opus by Roger Moore - is lured there by Drax (Michael Lonsdale), the evil genius of this episode who has taken up residence in the pyramid, from where he prepares his conquest of space.
Growth and recognition in the 21st century
Since the early 2000s, a new generation of filmmakers has been putting Guatemalan cinema on the international map. Among them, Jayro Bustamante is undoubtedly the best known, revealed by his first feature film Ixcanul (2015). Set around the Capaya Volcano, the character of Mariá, a seventeen-year-old Kaqchikel girl, finds herself confronted with an arranged marriage. Filmed between the El Patrocinio reserve and the city of Amatitlán, this film won numerous awards at international festivals, including the Berlinale. Jayro Bustamante then made two other films, Tremblings (2019) and La Llorona (2019), the latter based on another character from national tales and legends, La Llorona, a ghostly apparition who haunts the banks of rivers and lakes in search of her drowned children. A work that earned the director numerous awards, and a nomination for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, even though he didn't win the statuette. Another outstanding figure of this generation, César Diaz, editor and screenwriter, trained with the great master of Mexican cinema Alejandro González Iñárritu on Amores Perros (2000), before working with Bustamante on the aforementioned films. In 2019, he directed his first feature, Nuestras Madres (2019), a plunge into Guatemalan history in search of the ghosts of the past, as a young man tries to learn more about his father who disappeared in the guerrilla war. This Franco-Belgian-Guatemalan co-production won the director the Caméra d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Prix de la Critique. Sergio Ramírez, the third member of this national cinema revival, also makes genre films such as Jours de lumière (2019), an anticipation film that reflects on the impact of technology on our lives. He is also the author of the touching documentary Distancia (2012), following the footsteps of a father in search of his daughter, kidnapped during the civil war.
Guatemalan cinema now has a bright future ahead of it. The 1998 birth of the Icaro International Film Festival in Guatemala City, an initiative to bring together Central American filmmakers and cinephiles, and the development of film-focused school programs at the Francisco Marroquin University bear witness to this. The number of cinemas in the country is on the increase, and so is the audience, increasingly fond of national and international films.
