Our Mothers

The Guatemala of the grim drama Our Mothers (Nuestras Madres) sits on top of a boneyard whose bones date back to the country’s 36-year civil war, when army and paramilitary units escalated the torture, rape, and “extrajudicial” execution of civilians suspected of aiding left-wing guerrillas. The film is set long after the war, in 2018, when the current government began to hold former soldiers to account; and as the trial is broadcast on radio and TV, a young forensic archaeologist, Ernesto (Armando Espitia), emerges from sundry desolate excavation sites and begins the task of connecting hip bones to thigh bones, etc. When an indigenous woman, Nicolasa (Aurelia Caal), pressures Ernesto to return with her to her village to help dig up her own husband’s remains (“I want him to be in a place where I can speak to him,” she says), he demurs and then relents. What follows is the sort of movie that gets lost in the U.S. when life is normal. It’s a good one to see when you’re anxious, in pain, hypersensitized, uncertain of the ground beneath you, and thinking — maybe for the first time — that you ought to start digging.