Ixcanul

Ixcanul (2015)

María, a 17-year-old Kaqchikel Maya, lives with her parents on a coffee plantation at the foot of an active volcano. She is set to be married to the farm's foreman. But María longs to discover the world on the other side of the mountain, a place she cannot even imagine. And so she seduces a coffee-harvester who wants to escape to the USA. When this man leaves her behind, María discovers her own world and culture anew.

Date of release
2015-01-20
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (91)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Drama
Director
Jayro Bustamante

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 2 · Nominations: 1. Including: Silver Mirror; Platino Award for Best First Feature Film

Ixcanul is a 2015 Guatemalan drama film written and directed by Jayro Bustamante in his directorial debut. It was screened in the main competition section of the 65th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Alfred Bauer Prize. The film was selected as the Guatemalan entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards but was not nominated. It is the first film produced in the Kaqchikel language of the Mayan family.

Production

Ixcanul has a largely non-professional cast. In an interview, Jayro Bustamante, the film's Spanish-speaking director stated he wanted to shoot a film in Kaqchikel because of its low status in Guatemala, being seen as "the language of the Indians". Bustamante wrote the script for Ixcanul in French while studying at a film school in Paris, then translated it into Spanish upon his return to Guatemala, and finally had it translated into Kaqchikel.

Casting his actresses proved to be a major difficulty in the patriarchal society of Guatemala where machismo is the dominant value as most of the husbands of the street theater actresses proved unwilling to allow their wives to work in a film unsupervised. María Telón, a veteran street theater actress, was cast as Juana largely because as a widow she had no husband to answer to.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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