Film Review: Ixcanul
Film Review: Ixcanul
Guatemalan cinema is garnering worldwide recognition with this breakthrough film.
What’s behind the volcano?” María, an adolescent Mayan girl, asks her mother as they go about chores on the coffee plantation where they live and work in the film Ixcanul (“Volcano” in the Kaqchikel Maya language). The omnipresent volcano looming in the sky above her home in the Guatemalan highlands symbolizes an obstacle to María, who dreams of exploring what lies beyond, but has been promised to the plantation foreman.
In the hopes of altering her fate and escaping to the United States, María sleeps with a local worker, Pepe, who has confided to her that he plans to...
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