Thank you, Gerlinde, for recommending this movie!
A young Mayan girl working on a Guatemalan coffee plantation dreams of escaping her destiny (marrying the man of her parents' choice) and starting a new life in America. She doesn't actually know anything about America, but she wants to follow the boy she likes, maybe loves, when he goes there.
Maria is a girl of few words who lives on the slopes of an active volcano. She works hard with her mother to scratch a living out of a snake-infested patch of ground.
The story is really about love--the powerful love between a peasant mother and her daughter. It's fascinating from the lens of our culture to witness this particular kind of love. Speech between mother and daughter is minimal, but the mother strokes and bathes and dresses her daughter as we do with our children only when they are babies. The mother is un-self-conscious about her own aging body as she gets in the tub to bathe her daughter. Self-conscousness doesn't seem part of their culture.
While all foreign movies give us a look into other lives, this one reveals daily life in one Mayan family so slowly and in such detail that it's almost as if we are watching in real time without the artifice of film-making. When their tribal beliefs lead to the near-death of her beloved daughter, the mother tells her, "Don't believe everything they tell you"--even though she herself has been part of transmitting the same messages to her.
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