Ixcanul

A deeply moving portrait of a woman caught between the expectations of her Mayan relatives, and her own wish to run away and live her life.The film is set in the Guatemalan highlands, on the foot of the large volcano Ixancul. We follow Maria, who is to be married off to the plantation foreman Ignacio. She is not interested in Ignacio, and wish to marry the more ordinary farmer Pepe. Together they dream of running away to the US.

Ixcanul is just as much a film about impossible love as it is an ethnographic portrait of the Mayan culture in Guatemala. The Mayan villagers are portrayed with deep humanism. We feel how they are caught between fear and fascination of the modern world. They are both afraid of, and long for, the city, the US, gardens and cars.

The film has a unique way of balancing between giving a dystopian image of a culture threatened by modernity, and being a fascinating portrait of a culture that exists on the fringes of what many would consider to be “the normal life”. In this way Ixcanul reaches the goal of all ethnographies: to make the unknown known, or to familiarize the unfamiliar.

Jayro Bustamante (f. 1977) from Guatemala has worked and studied film in several countries, and got his international breakthrough with Ixcanul in 2015, which screened at film festivals all over the world. Bustamante has later made two more feature films which complete his trilogy of films about problems in modern Guatemala. He is one of the directors in focus at this year's festival.