Guatemalan filmmaker rebel Jayro Bustamante: “Ibero-America needs a catharsis in the face of oppressors and dictatorships”

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The film “La Llorona”, with 11 nominations, is the most acclaimed film of the 2021 Platino Ibero-American Film and Audiovisual Awards together with the Colombian production “El olvido que seremos”, which implies a recognition of great “value” for its director, Guatemalan Jayro Bustamente.

“It’s a very nice thing,” Bustamente told Efe news agency in an interview about the awards, since “it is the (film) industry itself that gives value” to the prizes.

Read also: Check out our coverage on Guatemala

The nominations were announced on July 19, with “La Llorona” as a favorite and the Colombian production “El Olvido que seremos” for the awards for best Ibero-American film and best director in the region, in addition to nine other categories.

The award ceremony of the VIII edition of the Platino Ibero-American Film and Audiovisual Awards will take place on October 3 in Madrid, Spain, and broadcast by 19 television stations worldwide.

BUSTAMANTE AND LA LLORONA

Bustamante, 44, said that with “La Llorona” (2019), he tried “to make a film that was like a catharsis ritual” and believes that “all of Ibero-America, including Spain, needs that catharsis in the face of those oppressive systems and those dictators who have humanely screwed us so much.”

For the Guatemalan film director, the oppression and dictatorships of the previous century in most countries of the region left a scar “in the families that were destroyed”.

In “La Llorona”, Bustamante mixes the Mesoamerican legend of a woman searching for her lost children with the Ixil genocide, committed by the State of Guatemala in the 1980s, in the north of the country, where the military sought to exterminate the indigenous population with the murder of more than 1,700 people, in the cruelest period of the internal armed conflict (1960-1996).

“It fucks (because) they made us believe that what they did was good and if one realizes, in Guatemala, many people continue to defend it, without realizing that by defending it they lose their humanity”, reiterates Bustamante.

The film director emphasizes that power has managed to “brainwash people into believing that thinking about harming someone can be accepted under” a political regime.

“That seems very impressive to me, and I believe that what is happening is that all of Ibero-America has the same need and the same catharsis,” said the screenwriter, whose film “La Llorona” was nominated for the Goya Awards in Spain and the Golden Globes in the United States, two unprecedented events for Guatemala.

THE THREE GUATEMALAN INSULTS

Bustamante has put his country’s name on the world’s main screens three times with his trilogy of films, which refer to the main insults to be reversed in Guatemala: Indian, ‘hueco’ (for queer) and communist, represented in “Ixcanul” (2015), “Temblores” (2019) and “La Llorona” (2019).

Bustamante accumulated hundreds of nominations and nearly 80 international awards between the three films, 23 of them with “La Llorona”, a Guatemalan-French production film that now seeks to sweep the 2021 Platino Awards.

“We started from the premise that ‘La Llorona’ is one of the most widely distributed Mesoamerican legends because it reaches as far as South America and has even evolved into misogyny and machismo; that’s why it was important to rewrite it and fill it with beauty,” he says.

And in a country, as battered as Guatemala, where there was a 36-year armed conflict (1960-1996) between the guerrillas and the Army and its civilian self-defense groups, which left 200,000 dead and 45,000 disappeared, magical realism was necessary “to imagine justice, and that means we will never have it,” he laments.

With multiple future projects underway simultaneously, mainly developing talent with 105 girls and 20 adults training for his upcoming productions, Bustamante is amazed that people in the big industries are “surprised” that filmmaking can also be done in Guatemala. “Here it can and has been done,” he celebrates.

“(I’m interested in) continuing to show the things we continue to do wrong, but I’m also interested in showing who we are and what our roots are, to see if that’s where we get a little pride and love, which is what we don’t have,” concludes the Guatemalan director.