The Guardian of Memory / El guardián de la memoria, the second feature film by director Marcela Arteaga, has won this week the top prizes for Best Mexican documentary both at DocsMX in Mexico City and at the Morelia Film Festival.
A strong and lyrical meditation on Mexico’s failed drug wars and their devastating impact on local communities, fueled by an astonishing cinematography by DP Axel Pedraza, The Guardian of Memory had its world premiere in the international competition at the last edition of the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival in Toronto. It recently had its U.S. premiere at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York City.
In Arteaga’s powerful documentary, dramatic and quiet landscapes from Mexico’s Juarez Valley are juxtaposed with horrifying but intimately-told tales of mass murder. In 2008, the Mexican government sent an army to the rugged border region with the purported goal of fighting the rampant drug trafficking. As locals from Juarez and Chihuahua tearfully recount the stories of their murdered or disappeared children, parents, and siblings, a Texas-based lawyer argues that asylum seekers from the area must be considered victims of a genocide.
“With striking visual poetry… director Marcela Arteaga bears witness to the violence that has displaced thousands, while examining how governments on both sides of the border have exacerbated the crisis” wrote Variety on the film.
As Mexico’s new federal administration, under the still-young presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has deployed more armed forces throughout the country and has granted them a constitutional role in domestic security—in clear opposition to his electoral promise of withdrawing the military from the streets, The Guardian of Memory serves as a daring and cinematic testament to a dragging humanitarian crisis with no clear end in sight.
