El Movimiento

El Movimiento is a compelling cinematic essay about the complicated relationship of noted North American anthropologist William F. Hanks with his teacher, Don Chabo, a widely-known Yucatec Maya shaman. The film explores the relationship of Don Chabo with his apprentice, with three generations of his family and with the numerous and varied persons who come before his altar. Over the ten years of filming on location in southern Yucatan, Hanks evidences an increasing sense of responsibility and burden as Don Chabo's only apprentice. The film explores the line between ethnography and engagement, the visible and the invisible, what can be known and what cannot.
El Movimiento is the representation of a collaboration between a shaman, an anthropologist and a filmmaker. It is built on a deep and specialized knowledge of Mayan-Franciscan religious practices, Spanish Colonial history, economic and political pressures impacting Yucatec Mayans at the end of the 20th century, the performance aspects of ritual, the uses of participatory camera, the multiple identities of a film subject, and the hopes, dramatic possibilities and limits of intercultural understanding. The film incorporates drawings, still photographs and film from special design cameras. Scenes range from Hanks and Don Chabo coming to terms with the contradictions of their relationship over the ten year period, to a woman who tries to hire Don Chabo to curse the person who beat her, to the exorcism of a young woman who had been kidnapped and then cursed by a Maya sorcerer. (Peter Thompson)