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The multi-award-winning directorial debut from Guatemala-born César Díaz, Our Mothers excavates the details of a painful but not widely discussed period of his country’s history: the civil war that raged between 1960 and 1996, pitting its military against its own citizens and resulting in the death or disappearance of about 250,000 people. This muted, Spanish-language drama follows Ernesto (Armando Espitia), a young forensic anthropologist dedicated to his work exhuming and cataloguing the mass graves containing bodies of those slaughtered during the unrest. A visit from an elderly woman (Aurelia Caal) hoping to reclaim her husband’s remains piques Ernesto’s interest after she shows him a photo that might cast some light on the mystery of his own family, specifically the fate of his father, a “disappeared” guerrilla fighter. His mother, however, would rather some secrets were left buried.
The final reveal, when it comes, is not entirely unexpected but this picture, like Pedro Almodóvar’s similarly themed Parallel Mothers and Identifying Features by Mexican director Fernanda Valadez, simply but powerfully examines a country’s relationship with its traumatic past.