A Fresh Look at Latin American Dictatorships

 Documentaries by a trio of young filmmakers who have looked to their own family histories as source material take fresh looks at Latin America's 20th-century dictatorships and armed conflicts. 

"We learned about the war from books, but we don't know about the intimate war, inside the families. We're a generation in Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and all of Central America that's exploring all that," Marcela Zamora, a 35-year-old Nicaraguan-born Salvadoran filmmaker whose documentary "Los ofendidos" (The Offended) was screened at this week's Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG), told EFE.

Her picture tells the story of the victims of El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war, which pitted government forces against leftist guerrillas.

One of those victims was Orozco's father, Ruben Zamora, a politician who helped negotiate the peace accords but who was tortured because of his guerrilla sympathies.

Chile's Lissette Orozco, 30, found in her own family's story a reflection of the polarization of the entire nation, which following the end of Augusto Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship has been divided into two bands: defenders of the victims of forced disappearance and other rights violations and those who say the general's repression of the left saved the country from becoming a Cuba-like communist state.

In her film "El pacto de Adriana" (Adriana's Pact), also screened this week at the FICG, Orozco attempts to learn the truth about one of her aunts, a woman whom she idolized as a child. That relative was arrested in 2007, and the filmmaker subsequently learned that she had worked for Pinochet's notorious DINA secret police.

Chile "is a country that's very divided and wounded at the same time, because you can go to the pharmacy and find your father's torturer or the person who made your uncle disappear," she said.

Her compatriot, Belgian-born Andres Lubbert, also drew on his family's history in "El color del camaleon" (The Color of the Chameleon).

Lubbert's documentary, which also was screened earlier this week at the FICG, describes how his father was forced to work as a secret agent of the Pinochet regime before managing to escape to Europe.

In the film, he constructs a psychological portrait of his father and together they delve into the truth of his past life.