Crying for Justice: Jayro Bustamante on La Llorona | Interviews

Then there’s Sabrina’s character, who represents people my age. We are the children who were born during the war and the heirs of that pain, and the ones who still today live with fear. In Guatemala we still live under the power of the military men that were in power in the '80s during the war. That hasn’t been eradicated yet, we are still fearful. When I started working on this movie a lot of people called me to dissuade me from making it. They told me, “Jayro, think about your safety. Think about your life.” The fear is very present. This generation, the one Sabrina and I are part of, is a lukewarm generation. We know what happened, and whether we are against what happened or not, we don’t dare speak out because we inherited that fear. That’s the role Sabrina is playing, and is so complex because she wants to open the doors to the truth but she can’t. She barely manages to keep them ajar. I told Sabrina, “You have to work on creating a woman who is tormented by that inheritance of pain she is carrying.” It was very painful for her to play the role because the character, Natalia, is very similar to her, is very similar to me, and to many of us who grew up around the same time. Lastly, there’s Ayla-Elea Hurtado’s role, she plays Sara, through whom I put the responsibly on the younger generation to open those doors and to do what we couldn’t do.

Your production company, La Casa de Producción, has almost singlehandedly reshaped the film landscape in Guatemala and given access to indigenous people to be part of it. Was this one of the core missions when you decided to found it?  

I started La Casa de Producción with my mother, Marina Peralta, in 2009. At the time we thought, “This house is going to give a roof to all those stories that haven’t been told.” It’s also important to note that it wasn’t only that indigenous people weren’t seen on screen, but that nobody was really on screen because Guatemala used to rarely make movies. Even today we only make maybe three or four movies a year. The idea was giving voice to those untold stories. It should be normal for indigenous people to be part of this country’s stories because the majority of the Guatemalan population is indigenous. It’s only logical for them to have a voice.

Out of the actors that recurrently appear in your work, including Juan Pablo Olyslager who we saw in “Temblores" and now here, María Telón is the only that is in all of your films to date. What specific ideas or topics did you discuss with her for her character in “La Llorona”? She is the housekeeper of a despicable villain.

She is one of my best friends. She comes from a lineage of Mayan spiritual guides. She is a great philosopher and psychologist. She is much shier in real life or with the press than when she is acting. I have a lot of affection for her because is she is a great life teacher. We are like accomplices when we talk about the movies we are going to make together. In the case of “La Llorona,” when I called her to tell her about this character I said, “María, I’m really conflicted about proposing this character to you, because we are falling again into the same cliché of indigenous people playing housekeeping roles in the homes of white people.” But at the same time I explained to her that this character was important because even to this day in Guatemala, and other places, people believe that a good housekeeper is the one who does everything but whose presence is never perceived. They are like ghosts. We came back to the idea of this world of ghosts that walk through this house and who surround the guilty white characters.

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