No one tells a ghost story like Jayro Bustamante.
The Guatemalan filmmaker, whose latest release, “Rita,” debuts on the streaming service Shudder Friday, uses the language of horror cinema to gaze upon the darkest chapters of his country’s history in order to unearth terrible universal truths.
In “Rita,” Bustamante turns his attention to a Guatemalan tragedy that shocked the world: the 2017 orphanage fire in Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción, where 41 girls died when they were locked in a room following an escape attempt, amid their ongoing protest against poor conditions and allegations of abuse. Officials and police placed on guard refused to let the girls out of the room until it was too late. Bustamante sees the teen girls’ attempt to take action against the injustice inflicted upon them as heroic — and “Rita” is his tribute to them.
“Being their age, and having the capacity to say ‘¡basta!’ [enough!], and make a revolution, makes you a hero,” Bustamante said in a recent Zoom interview.
“Rita” retells the events leading up to the fire through a fairy-tale lens. The story is narrated by Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz), the newest ward at an orphanage based on Virgen de la Asunción, who says she’s going to tell the story the only way she knows how. The result is a dark fantasy that hews true to real events but is pointed in its use of magical realism and surreal asides.
“When you live in a world where injustice is currency,” Bustamante said, “you have to go into magical worlds to have hope.”
The director’s fantastical approach was inspired by interviews with the survivors of the fire and other young wards of similar institutions. Bustamante conducted an open casting call to fill his fictional take on the orphanage, with 5,000 applicants from across Guatemala. Ultimately, 300 girls were chosen, and Bustamante collaborated with them in building out the fairy-tale elements that levy the grimness of the setting — the girls in Rita’s dorm wear angel wings, for example. Bustamante found many survivors would tell their story “using a lot of fairy tales or magical sentences to talk about things,” he explained.
“Rita” is Bustamante’s second horror film after 2019′s “La Llorona,” which similarly grafted a folkloric ghost story onto another grim period in Guatemalan history, the 1980s Maya genocide. Both films — alongside Bustamante’s earliest works, the Indigenous tragedy “Ixcanul” (2015) and the queer drama “Temblores” (2019) — are concerned with giving voice to groups whose stories are rarely heard in Guatemalan society, or in the world at large.
“I don’t believe that impunity is free,” Bustamante said when asked about the moral arc of his work. “The cost [of acting with impunity] has to be high.” This belief is at the root of Bustamante’s attraction to horror. His films bear witness to the darker aspects of Central American society by adopting the perspective of the oppressed — the ghost that appears in “La Llorona,” for example, directly evokes the Maya peoples slaughtered at the behest of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.
“In the Western world, ghosts are people whose souls are haunting us, scaring us,” Bustamante said. “But in my culture, ghosts are our ancestors, they are protecting us, guiding us. You can only be harmed by a ghost if you have something to pay for.”
“Rita,” like “La Llorona,” is unambiguous about the themes and events it wrestles with, using its horror elements — spectral figures, magical apparitions, and human peril — to underline the real-world nightmare it comments on.
And while Bustamante’s perspective is new — the Guatemalan film industry is small, only releasing a handful of films every year — his work is in step with the grand tradition of horror movies as a means to process a sociopolitical moment.
“Some of the most classic and essential horror has always been in conversation with current events, whether directly or not,” said Sam Zimmerman, the VP of programming for Shudder who’s responsible for bringing “La Llorona” and “Rita” to US streaming audiences. “Jayro is very confrontational with [current events], which is really exciting because he wants to not only make really stirring and invigorating films, but create an awareness for what is going on within Guatemala.”
The fallout from the horrors depicted in “Rita” are still ongoing. The Guatemalan legal system is sorting through the aftermath, a drawn-out reminder for the fire’s 15 survivors of how their country failed them. And while many Guatemalans protested the tragedy as a miscarriage of justice, Bustamante recalls others who responded by blaming the victims.
“Adults said, ‘Those are not girls, those are delinquents, those are dangerous people.” Bustamante recalled. “It’s so easy to be scared of other people. If I told you, ‘Be careful around that girl because she’s dangerous,’ you will believe me, and you will keep your distance. But if I told you, ‘That girl is a wonderful person,’ and she comes from a different sector of society — based on the color of her skin, or whatever labels we use — you will have more problems believing the good things. So I really wanted to break the stigma. I wanted to say, ‘Yes, these are more than just girls. They are fantastic.’”
While Bustamante has shown “Rita” to Guatemalan politicians, activists, survivors, and family members of the fire’s victims, he remains modest about the impact he hopes to have with his films — to give these girls a voice, to challenge the stigma carried by those in poverty.
“I don’t think that art can change politics,” said Bustamante, “but I think that behind politics there are people, and maybe we can, in a way, touch their soul.”
Or haunt them. Like a ghost.
Joshua Rivera is a journalist and critic covering entertainment and the arts.
This post was originally published on here
