Why La Llorona (2019) is an important film. [This is not the terrible The Curse of La Llorona]
https://rebrand.ly/MovieMeows/LaLlorona
La Llorona had the misfortune of releasing the same year as The Curse of La Llorona from The Conjuring universe and thus went under the radar. So, I thought I would shine some light on this drama-horror from Guatemala.
Background - La Llorona (or the weeping woman) is a folktale popular across Latin America. It is speaks of a beautiful woman courted by a handsome traveler. After marriage and a couple of children, the husband decided to take a younger mistress. Distraught, the woman decides to take away what was most precious to her husband; his children. She drowns them in the nearby stream. However, after coming to her senses, she is consumed with sorrow and to this day she roams the land in search of her children. She steals misbehaving children and drowns them. It is used as a spooky story to get children to behave.
The Movie - The movie opens at residence of an obviously wealthy family. The patriarch of the family is awaiting trial at a UN like body, for a genocide he inflicted upon the indigenous peoples in his country about 20 years prior. This got me intrigued. Movies just don't insert a tyrant such as this, in a movie set in the contemporary times in their own country, unless it is based in reality. And sure enough, he is based on the real-life military dictator, Efrain Rios Montt.
Montt died without facing any judicial consequences for his crimes. The director, Jayro Bustamante, decided to see it done, in a poetic fashion, in his movie. A mysterious young woman, joins the former dictator's household as a maid. She is strongly implied to be La Llorona through imagery and brief lines of dialogue about her past. Her presence forces his family, who do not speak of his crimes and deny it to themselves, to confront the truth about their beloved husband and father. And the old man himself starts hearing faint wailing, causing him to go paranoid.
The folklore is given the respect it deserves and the director even offers his own re-interpretation of the age-old character. Here she is no longer a passive mourner. Rather a woman who walks in to exact justice for her many children; the people of the land.
While Hollywood took the folklore of La Llorona and turned her into another generic ghost in a movie full of jump-scares, Bustamante, the Guatemalan filmmaker, who probably grew up with her, shows a deep understanding, re-interprets her and weaves her story seamlessly into the modern-day context of his country. Giving us a movie which could never come from any foreign movie industry (Hollywood is foreign to them).
This is one of the very first films to be made in Guatemala and Bustamante is one of the filmmakers building their movie industry from the ground up. Hoping to see such efforts from many other countries with no movie industries.
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