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  Ixcanul

  In director Jayro Bustamante’s feature debut, Ixcanul (2015), a Kaqchiquel-speaking family negotiates their survival as farmers on a landowner’s plot in Guatemala. Looming in the distance is the Pacaya volcano from which the film takes its name. (Ixcanul means “volcano” in Kaqchiquel.) At stake is the future of María, beautifully portrayed by first-time Mayan actress María Mercedes Coroy, who is to be wed to the landowner, Ignacio (Justo Lorenzo), in the interest of securing her family’s access to the land they work. In the distance, said volcano separates their world from Mexico and the United States, to which María’s lover, Pepe, soon migrates in search of an imagined better future, leaving her to grapple with his loss. What at first seems to be a community and family-driven drama, drawn in long shots across pristine highlands, takes a turn toward social realism once María’s actions catch up with her, putting her family’s future at risk. María’s quiet existence will suddenly implode as her acts of surrender—to her lover and to her fate—bring on both community and broader social interventions. María embodies the tense relationships between Mayan communities and the state, between labor and profit, and against the confines of both tradition and modernity. Source: Córdova, Amalia. "Review of Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul." NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 49, no. 1, 2017, pp. 114-115.

  Tags Maya