MARIA’S STORY DOCUMENTARY – FROM OPPRESSIVE STRUGGLE TOWARDS A BETTER LIFE
During the years of 1980 to 1992, El Salvador’s Central American story was one of being embroiled in a civil war between a military-led government and the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional.
The USA backed the Salvadoran government under the guise of anti-Communism. Sadly, human rights groups gave witness accounts that the US also lent aid to paramilitary death squads in the process.
Thousands lost their lives before the guerrillas and officials signed peace accords and FMLN was legitimated as a recgonized political party. It has only been recently that the FMLN through the process of democracy has become the government leading El Salvador.
Against this backdrop of horrific struggle, Maria’s Story: A Documentary Portrait Of Love And Survival In El Salvador’s Civil War, gives the account of Maria in the DVD re-issued twenty years later. Maria Serrano, the activist-mother’s engagement in the armed struggle of the period supporting the FMLN show’s one woman’s passion for a more democratic process of governance in her homeleand.
Once a campesino organizer, Serrano was propelled into the revolution by government repression of the citizenry. In the documentary, her very personal account of El Salvador’s fight for resources for the poor is moving. In the documenatry you see a mother leading military operations for the FMLN, something she says she would never have imagined.
However due to government oppression and increasing violence against civilians, hundreds of Salvadorenas and Salvadorenos united with revolutionaries in the quest for a better life and to seek oxygen to breath for the country’s underclass who were gristle in an oppressive machine of corrupt governance.
Life is hard in El Salvador’s jungles as seen in Maria’s Story. Fears of death squads kept Maria and her children jungle-based and they did not treat their lives as being on some sort of hero’s journey, but rather a journey of seeking freedom.
As Serrano tells the story, her El Salvador’s civil war depicts a people who have everything to gain. Her people fought for the desperately hungry, destitute and oppresssed people. Serrano’s warmth is nothing less than stunning in this film.
To see the original review go here or to read Ernesto Aguilar‘s words, or, to: Maria’s Story. The documentary Maria’s Story is produced by Pamela Cohen and Catherine M. Ryan. The film is directed by Monona Wali and Pamela Cohen.
[Movie poster courtesy of IPG]
~Posted by Horiwood.Com, Aotearoa New Zealand, Polynesia Asia-Pacific. 17.1.12~
