Ixcanul: Love And Betrayal

Ixcanul is a quietly painful movie on the love and betrayal, hope and disappointment, resistance and defeat, but most importantly it is a story Jayro Bustamante tells us about Kaqchikel culture. The movie pictures the life of the Kaqchikel, the indigenous Maya people living on the slopes of volcano in Guatemala as both brutal and sadly beautiful. The lack of embellishments, short yet insightful dialogues, slow pace and realistic, detailed account of surroundings and characters produced an extremely authentic and appealing film. Director’s intentional emphasis on reality and Maria’s mostly nonverbal nevertheless poignant self-expression made the movie particularly fascinating for me.
If Clifford Geertz approached culture as a text to disentangle
The ritual of praying in the beginning of the movie where Maria’s mother asks for mercy from the wind, volcano and other spirits signals that the nature is venerated by the Maya people. It is also worth noting that her primary request is an arrangement of a successful and happy marriage for Maria, which is suggestive of the Kaqchikel’s perceptions of woman as a mother and a caregiver. We encounter the same narrative in the scene where Maria’s and Ingnacio’s family gather around the dinner to arrange the wedding. While Ignacio’s parents are interested in Maria’s fertility and cooking skills, Ignacio is mainly evaluated by him being a man of affairs. Additionally, perspective kinship in this case serves to create an enduring economic bond since Maria’s parents and Ignacio are already engaged in material relations. Kinship in Kaqchikel appears not to be primarily political as Evans Pritchard observed among the Nuer but economic and material. Once the plans for marriage were challenged, Maria’s parents got afraid of losing the job on Ignacio’s plantation. The beliefs on the strong connection between humans and nature is represented in the bathroom scene where Maria compares her state of pregnancy to the volcano, while the mother tells her that