INTERVIEW: New Guatemalan film finds man stuck between his religion and his sexuality
Photo: Mauricio Armas Zebadúa and Juan Pablo Olyslager star in Temblores, the new film from Jayro Bustamante. Photo courtesy of Film Movement / Provided by press site with permission.
Director Jayro Bustamante’s new film, Temblores, follows the trials and tribulations of Pablo (Juan Pablo Olyslager) as he tells his Evangelical Christian family that he is leaving his wife for another man. After he comes out as gay, he is sent into a tug-of-war match between his past life, filled with religious scripture and devoted family members, and his new life, which finds him getting accustomed to the gay subculture in Guatemala City.
However, Pablo’s family is not willing to let him leave so easily.
This is the second film in a planned triptych from Bustamante, whose previous movie is Ixcanul, a celebrated film about a young indigenous woman.
“So I was trying to find a nice topic about the second [film] when I met a man that I call my first Pablo,” Bustamante said in a recent phone interview. “He told me his story, and after that I started looking for all those Pablos to make research. And I found 22 Pablos, and I started working with their life and their stories.”
Guatemala is a country that offers few legal rights to the LGBTQ+ community, according to a recent article from Reuters, and Bustamante wanted to create a film that placed characters within this societal struggle.
“In a way, I wanted to talk about the society,” the filmmaker said. “I didn’t want to make the film in a little town in the country because I didn’t want to give the sensation that this kind of story can happen in a small town or with people who don’t have resources or who don’t have studies or don’t have a vision of the real world, so to me it was very important [to set the film in Guatemala City] because when I met these 22 Pablos, they came from the best universities from Guatemala. They made a lot of travels. They were very informed about this life in other countries. Even with that, they were trapped in this society and in their family because of how they lived.”
The production for Temblores, (or Tremors), took six weeks, but prior to Bustamante hitting the record button, he worked with the cast of largely nonprofessional actors for several months.
“Normally we don’t have movie actors in Guatemala because we don’t have a very big industry, so I had to form the actors who played in the film,” he said. “Juan Pablo [Olyslager] and Maria Telón, who plays the nanny in the film, they were the only two actors having experience making films.”
Even though Olyslager has acted in many films before, the actor still took part in the director’s workshops with the nonprofessional actors. He wanted to be on the same cinematic page as his fellow members of the ensemble.
“He told me, ‘Just teach me the way that you want to work,'” the director remembers him saying. “And Juan Pablo put a lot of his own life into the character, and to me it was important too because I know Juan Pablo very well. And he’s a very open-minded man, so it was important to have a heterosexual guy playing a gay role to have the heterosexual guy’s voice to defend the homosexual cause. … I think Juan Pablo is not only a good actor, he’s a good man. He’s a man trying to defend LGBT rights.”
The critique that Bustamante puts forth is not solely about conservatism or religiosity. He is trying to generate a conversation about acceptance and human rights, and this can be seen in his previous film, Ixcanul, and his next one, La Llorona, which focuses on the mistreatment of women.
One example of the broad approach he took to the issues of religion and sexuality can be found near the end of Temblores, which is currently playing in New York City and Miami, before it opens wider in coming weeks. When a religious ritual is re-created on screen, Bustamante uses the Evangelical faith as his basis, but Roman Catholic icons are also utilized. He even has the actors say a Jewish prayer. Put simply, the writer-director wanted to offer his commentary on all religion, not simply one strain of Christianity.
These directorial techniques were learned and developed over the course of Bustamante’s career and life. He has been an informal student of film ever since he was 11 years old when he became interested in European cinema thanks to a cinema club that was right near his home growing up.
“I lived in a very small town, but a very, very touristic town, so I had the chance to have coffee at a cinema club next to my house,” he said. “When I say cinema club, it was kind of a coffee with a TV, and all the tourists came in there, left some VHS films and some books. And they shared things like that, so I was introduced to independent movies very early.”
Today, Bustamante lives between Paris and Guatemala City, and he cannot wait to see how audiences outside of the film-festival circuit react to Temblores, which won the Grand Jury Prize at NewFest.
“I think it’s a very, very important audience for us,” he said of American moviegoers. “All the Latin American stories have opened a little space in the U.S.A., so I’m very excited. … I’m just waiting for the reaction.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Temblores, directed by Jayro Bustamante, is now playing in New York City and Miami, with expansion into more cities in the future. Click here for more information.
