Last Saturday, my friend Amalia Walker ’17 and I trekked across Cornell’s campus to Cornell Cinema, located in Willard Straight Hall. We were there to watch Ixcanul, the final showing of the film series hosted by ¡CULTURA! Ithaca. We already had firsthand experience with the organization, which focuses on sharing Latin American culture with Ithaca through art-based educational experiences, having attended their weekly Spanish conversational groups. With both of our busy schedules this was the only movie we could both make, and we were jittery with excitement.
Within the first 30 seconds of the movie, we were struck with an unwelcomed surprise: the movie wasn’t actually in Spanish, but Kaqchikel, an indigenous Mesoamerican language native to Guatemala. Disappointing, because part of the anticipated fun would have been racing to keep up with dialogue in a desperate effort to avoid flashing our eyes to the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Nonetheless, Kaqchikel has a fascinating sound to it; it is throaty, expressive, whistling. Walker said she thought it had some characteristics reminiscent of Arabic. It reminded me more of English recordings set backwards.
Beyond the exoticness of the language, the cinematography of landscape and human activities was equally unfamiliar and fascinating to me. The movie followed a young indigenous girl in Guatemala, promised as a bride to the older man who owns the farm that employs her father. For the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, we do not know her name or her story; we are watching the daily routine of her and her mother, which includes chores such as feeding pigs, chopping hay, and transporting huge baskets on their heads along winding mountain paths. These scenes of domestic activity are serenely captured on camera, but I eventually became bored with them, anticipating the start of a plot.
Finally, we learn more about the girl, María, and her family. Ignacio, her arranged suitor, visits her home with his entire family in tow, and a meal ensues that depicts the people’s culture overtly: the family members speak loudly, interrupting one another and making somewhat crude jokes about the couple’s first night of marriage. Fertility and fidelity are promised.
But the plot is complicated when María sneaks into the woods one night with a very drunk friend and, in an act of what the viewer can only assume is rebellion, loses her virginity. She tries to run away with her new lover to America, but the next morning, he has left without her. As can be predicted by the nature of movies, María becomes pregnant. Despite many herbal, superstitious treatments for abortion, the baby survives until María suffers a dangerous snake bite that sends her out of the countryside into a modern city. The (Spanish-speaking!) doctor there saves her life, but María’s fiancée takes advantage of his ability to speak Spanish and arranges for the doctor to sell the baby, telling María it didn’t survive.
At the end of the movie, María is the same peasant girl that she was in the beginning. She has escaped neither her country nor her marriage, and she has lost the child she had grown to love. In fact, this completed loop was made evident in the cinematography, as the film closed with the same scene with which it opened: María facing the camera, looking stoically down, her mother behind her, fastening colored flowers into her hair and trying on her elaborate wedding garb. Nothing has changed.
Although the film was at times quite slow-paced, the messages and images of Ixcanul are exceptionally portrayed. The viewer not only cares about María by the end of the movie, but also about the land of Guatemala, whose gorgeous scenery of mountains and lush jungles back nearly every scene. Although we had been expecting a movie in Spanish, surviving indigenous societies and languages are an integral part of Latin American culture that are often overlooked, and having watched this movie, I’m glad that ¡CULTURA! decided to include it and others of its type in the series.
¡CULTURA! Ithaca holds many events throughout the year, including art shows, readings, conversational groups, and food tastings. Latin American culture is rich and vastly diverse, and Ithaca is lucky to experience even this small taste of it.
http://www.ithacaevents.com/producer/865-cultura-ithaca.html