Guatemala's "disappeared" have their day in Cesar Diaz's quietly moving OUR MOTHERS

The more we learn about the various countries of Latin America, the more we discover that each one appears to have it own version of "the disappeared," that multitude of citizens murdered (often tortured first) by the military -- think Chile or Argentina -- and then buried in unmmarked graves so that any identification would be difficult to prove.

Sometimes (as in Brazil), they were simply murdered by the police, with no need for justification.

Recently, we've been seeing more movies from the Central American country of Guatemala, though the two previous that TrustMovies has seen -- Temblores and José -- were concerned with present-day GLBT issues, rather than the crimes of past dictators.

OUR MOTHERS (Nuestras Madres), the new film written and directed by Cesar Diaz (shown at right), addresses these crimes head-on, yet in a style told simply, slowly and honestly -- with enough skill to more than pass muster.

Senor Diaz's dialog is serviceable, if somewhat obviously expository, but his visuals -- especially when he is simply surveying the faces of the relatives, in particular the mothers of the disappeared -- are generally expert: revelatory and moving.

The film begins with a pair of delicate hands piecing together skeletal remains and finally presenting these to the widow of the man to whom the skeleton belonged. Later, in a bar over drinks with a friend, our hero, this "remains" gatherer named Ernesto (Amando Espiritia, above, center left) who works for the government, listens sadly as his friend remarks, "To live in this shitty city, you need to go mad or get drunk."

Fortunately Ernesto does neither but simply soldiers on in his quest to uncover history. During another investigation, a photo of townspeople with guerrillas, shown him by a still-grieivng mother, comes a little too close to home for our hero, and an entirely new investigation begins. This one has more to do with "our fathers" than it does our mothers.

Along the way, we're faced with some difficult ideas, as when Ernesto contrasts the philosophies of the soldiers with that of the guerrillas, and the widow reduces them both to mere military uniforms. We also see more of Guatemalan life as lived by these mostly indigenous widows and by Ernesto and his mother. It all seems seedy, if not downright ugly, with too many supporting players in the story either wanting to forget about the past or simply remain money-hungry in the present.

By the time the movie concludes, daddy issues are in full swing, a major surprise is on offer, and the film's final spoken line proves almost unbearably moving. Our Mothers is a movie that needed to be made. How good it is that it was made this well.

From Outsider Pictures, in Spanish with English subtitles and running just 77 minutes, the film was to have opened theatrically this past April but will now have its virtual premiere this Friday, May 1, in over 15 cinemas nationwide. Wherever you live across the country, click here to learn if there is one of these virtual theaters near you.

Chile, Pinochet, Allende and the sea: Patricio Guzmán's placid, lovely THE PEARL BUTTON

Those of us who have followed the career of writer/director Patricio Guzmán have seen this documentary filmmaker grow and change from a young(er) man covering the dreadful fall and murder of the democratically-elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende -- thanks to the nefarious and illegal efforts of our own nation and its sleazy right-wing leaders -- to an older, seasoned and increa-singly mystical man who must continue covering the horrible events that happen-ed to his country.

With his latest effort, THE PEARL BUTTON, we see the filmmaker (Guzmán is shown at right) moving from the angst and anger of his youth into even more of the quiet, calm acceptance of what has been -- together with the kind of mystical, encompassing understanding that seems to come to some of us with age --  that was such a part of this filmmaker's last documentary, Nostalgia for the Light. While Nostalgia/Light looked up and outward into the skies and to the universe to find solace in the understanding that both the stars out there and the bones of the Chilean dead (and living) are made of calcium, The Pearl Button considers the great sea that partially encompasses Chile and how it, too, has served as solace, provider and graveyard for its people.

This is not to say that, by accepting the past, Guzman is in any way condoning it. Hardly. This man appears to have lived and worked to do as much as he can to keep Chile's awful past current in the minds of his countrymen. It's just that he is now doing it in a more thoughtful, philosophical, even poetic manner -- and the result is a movie that moves us via its beauty, as well as its unearthing of not-so-ancient horrors.

In fact, the Allende regime, together with its disgusting replacement by Pinochet and his minions, does not even come up until past the film's halfway point (the documentary lasts but 79 minutes). Prior to this, we get a strange and amazing history of the indigenous tribes of Patagonia (above), in Chile's southern extreme: how they lived via the sea, how they devoted their bodies (below) to providing a canvas for their art and myths, and how they were at last wiped out almost completely in a genocide that pre-dated by maybe a century or more Pinochet's attempt to wipe out Chile's "socialist" population.

Visually The Pearl Button offers some gorgeous location shots of Chile's ocean venues, its glacial areas, as well as its more verdant locations. We see rain and ice and the original native population -- what's left of them, anyway. We meet poets and scientists and those natives themselves, and finally a few of the folk involved in and with the many "disappeared" who were tortured and murdered during the Pinochet regime.

This is a constant in Guzman's films, though here it is used in a manner much more quiet and subdued than ever before. In fact, there are really only two major disappeared people who are important to the film. One is a young schoolmate of Patricio's who drowns and is never found (the first "disappeared," the filmmaker call him); the other is Marta Ugarte, a woman whom we know mostly by the extraordinary and extraordinarily awful manner in which she died. This is told to us quietly, as is all else in the film, but Ms Ugarte stands in remarkably well for the rest of the "disappeared." As for the impunity offered to so many of the torturers and murderers, "This is," notes Guzmán, "like killing the dead twice."

The movie is, by turns, pantheistic, mystical, challenging, thoughtful, poetic, and sad. We see geography as destiny, and history as horror that only repeats itself. If Guzmán gives this genocide to us filtered through a kind of mysticism, given a subject this awful -- this difficult to comprehend and tolerate -- I am beginning to wonder how else it can be done? I'm stymied. If you have a suggestion, please feel free to offer it up.

Meanwhile, The Pearl Button, from Kino Lorber -- the title of which harks back to those aboriginal natives and one of their number, dubbed Jemmy Button, who (just as does the main character in Malick's classic, The New World) travels to England to discover "civilization" and is paid for his trouble with that titular button -- opens this Friday, October 23, in New York City at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema. In the weeks to follow, it will open in seven more cities. You can click here (then scroll down) to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.

Carlos Bolado's OLVIDADOS sheds some light on those South American dictators' dirty wars

The 1970s were not a good time for many South America countries, what with one dictator after another -- in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay -- cracking down on any perceived rumblings of unrest by the populace: torturing, murdering and finally "disappearing" that portion of the people considered to be a left-wing threat. One of the strengths of the new film, OLVIDADOS (Forgotten), getting its U.S. theatrical debut today in New York City (it opens next month in Los Angeles) is that it demonstrates to a greater extent than I have seen previously in a narrative film how those South American dictators joined forces to do their dirty work, thus making it easier than ever to crush the opposition.

As directed by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Bolado, shown at left, and starring that fine Mexican actor, Damián Alcázar (seen below),  the movie is a Bolivian production, filmed in its home country, as well as in Chile, Argentina and the USA. Among other historically accurate things, it shows how much of the training for this multi-country repression and torture came from the United States, which provided the training and some military -- as well as funding -- to fight this "Communist threat," which is how the USA labeled it, though the general populace of the countries involved might as easily have called it a fight for government by the people.

Señor Alcázar plays José Mendieta, a high-level military Bolivian officer given the job of finding, imprisoning, torturing and obtaining evidence/confessions/names of co-conspirators from within the populace. He does all this with enormous relish and barely a second thought for the lives of the prisoners he and his henchmen destroy. Alcázar is capable of great versatility, from fine comedic acting through nearly all else. Here, he plays the Colonel at two ages: middle and old (in not very good "age" make-up), and is mostly asked to be cruel as his younger self and frightened/guilty in his older incarnation.

It is the rest of the ensemble cast that enliven the movie with their energy and fraught situation. Mostly, they are the victims, and our sympathy goes out to them, along with a good degree of horror at what they must endure. Movies like this -- and we have now seen quite a number of them in both narrative and documentary form -- almost by necessity demand a certain amount of realistic torture. My spouse found the film too much -- torture porn, he called it -- while I felt it did what was necessary to get across the message

The movie gives both sides the opportunity to advance their message (even within the protesters, there is disagreement about how far to go and how much to give up), but when one side accompanies its message with the kind of maiming and murder that so many South Americans were put through, this does tend, rightly I think, to stack the deck against it.

Stylistically, the film has enough flourish to make it easy to sit through. The torture is intercut with good memories from the victims' lives, while the past and present of the Colonel and his absent son are handled well, too. There is a particularly telling scene toward the end of the film between that son and an interrogator, when the son returns to Bolivia after a long absence.

A pregnant woman (Carla Ortiz, above, the film's female star and its producer) figures prominently in the story, too, which pushes open even farther the door to the subject of parenting, parentage and those babies said to have been stolen from their birth mothers and given to "better" families who would raise them "properly."

Olvidados covers a lot of territory in its 112-minute length. You can think of it as a kind of Holocaust movie with Latin American socialists taking the place of Jews (though some victims here are both). Just as it is vital not to forget what happened to the Jews, it is just as important to remember the "disappeared" of South and Central America. Otherwise, those olvidados will indeed be forgotten.

The movie, from the Cinema Libre Studio, opens today, Friday, September 18, in New York City at the Village East Cinema, and on Friday, October 2, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal.  The DVD, Blu-ray and download-to-own option (via Amazon and Vimeo) will become available on December 1, with an iTunes debut scheduled for January 15, 2016. HBO and HBO Latino will join the parade in mid-December.

Of Stars and Bones: Patricio Guzmán's profound NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT

New Yorkers are blessed this week to have two documen-taries as diverse and humbling as Bill Cunningham New York (covered two days ago) and now the latest exploration of history and memory in Chile from Patricio Guzmán, the filmmaker/poet who has given us The Battle of Chile; Chile, Obstinate Memory; and the documen-tary about Salvador Allende (also covered earlier this week).

His new film NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, which won Best Docu-mentary at last year's European Film Awards, may not actually bring to a close Guzmán's accounting of the ravaging of his birth country by the Pinochet regime (nothing save the filmmaker's own death will shut that door), but it is hard to imagine that he might do anything better, richer or more profound than this new film.

From the metallic sheen of the telescope (below) that opens the movie to the lace napkin and linen tablecloth in the kitchen or the slim, sculpted legs of a wooden chair in the living room that we see soon after -- the objects that begin the film are captured with such attention and love that we feel somehow secure. We're in the Atacama Desert, where the humidity is the lowest of anywhere on our planet and the air is ultra-clear for viewing the stars. Guzmán (shown at left) narrates the film himself, and his soothing, meditative voice, accompanied by a parade of stunning images, tells of the history of this unusual desert (where rain never comes), with its mollusks and meteorites, archeology and (now) astronomy.

The filmmaker speaks first with an astronomer -- a smart, thoughtful fellow who lives and works in the desert -- and who waxes philosophical about everything from the stars to time itself: "Does the present exist?" he asks, after giving us a terrific explanation of why not. "Maybe only in our mind." (So much for that once popular phrase, Be Here Now.) Another man notes that the country of Chile still remains in the grasp of the coup d'etat: "We've hidden away our nearest past, the 19th Century -- and the Indians." He speaks of buried minerals and buried men, as we watch a row of musical spoons waft and sing in the wind and think about what we owe other living humans beings.

A half-hour in, we get the real connection: Near the observatory (above) lies the remains of Chacabuco, the largest concentration camp of the Pinochet regime. We meet a former prisoner from the camp who explains how he and others in a group of prisoners would observe the stars and feel oddly... free. (Until the guards made them stop because they might use those stars to navigate to freedom. As if.)

We learn that the regime buried many of their prisoners here in the surrounding desert. And then, to ensure that the bodies could not be found, identified and the guilty prosecuted, they dug up those corpses, broke them apart and re-buried them. We meet several of the women (below) who now spend their lives digging and searching through the many bones (and bits of bones) for their "disappeared" loved ones. One of these sits in the desert and speaks of finding and then stroking her brothers foot. "We were reuinited. Only then could I take in the fact that he was dead."

We also meet an exiled mother and son, now back in Chile. He's an astronomer, she gives massages to the victims of the torture. Guzmán does not dwell on the atrocities, as we've seen and heard about them previously. Yet through these people and their stories we glimpse quite enough to make this terrible time indelible.

The last story is that of a young female astronomer (above) who could easily stand in for this entire country. Used as a child hostage by the Pinochet regime to get her grandparents to tell the whereabouts of her parents (which they did  in order to save the child's life), she lost both parents and was raised by her grandparents. How the young woman, herself now a mother, has come to terms with all that has happened, how she feels and why, her splendid use of the word "defect," and how, via astronomy and contemplation, she has found her place in the universe -- all this is profoundly important and moving, a privilege to experience.

You will stand up after watching Nostalgia for the Light feeling invigorated and chastened, with the images of the disappeared -- in close-up above, and all together, like some mammoth AIDS quilt made of tiles, below -- an indelible, even welcome presence. Though absent, they are still here.

Many of the people interviewed in the film are not particularly religious, yet their thoughts and ideas stuck me as being as close to the truth about what unites us to each other and to the universe as anything I have yet heard.  If this is not pleasing to the Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalist religions, it is certainly good enough for me. As I hope it will be for you.

Nostalgia for the Light, from Icarus Films, debuts this Friday, March 18, at IFC Center, New York, for an exclusive two-week engagement. For a complete listing of venues -- cities, dates and theaters (14 in the U.S., two in Canada) where you can see this film, click here. Coming from Icarus, of course, there will also, eventually, be a DVD available.

Note: Interested in meeting this wonderful filmmaker? Señor Guzmán will appear in person at IFC Center on Friday, 3/18, and Saturday, 3/19, at the 8:10 shows.