Wednesday, Oct. 30, French documentary filmmaker Philippe Goyvaertz discussed the making of his “Filming Postwar Guatemala” quartet with anthropology graduate student Grace Helmick ’21 and professor of anthropology Sergio Palencia Frener, who translated Goyvaertz’s responses.
This public interview was the third event of the week’s anthropology “Brown Bag” series featuring screenings and discussions of Goyvaertz’s Guatemala documentaries: “The Earth’s Essence” (2010), “The Ills of the Imaginary” (2015), “When the Earth Shines” (2012) and “A Priest in Maya Land” (2003).
As a child, Goyvaertz traveled the world and discovered cultures with his parents.
“We’d go to Turkey and Syria and we would watch documentaries together,” Goyvaertz said.
He never expected to enter the film industry, initially following his parents’ dreams for him to “follow a normal life and become a lawyer.” It was during law school when Goyvaertz visited the Middle Eastern Research Center with a friend that he realized he was “not impressed by law school” anymore.
Goyvaertz began studying Chinese, explaining that it was the most distant of languages at the time.
He started working with the Chinese diaspora communities living in France when he met a friend who sparked his interest in another new field: film.
“I was an assistant in his productions. This was my first time working with documentaries,” Goyvaertaz said.
He took a trip to China and began working on a documentary about traditional Chinese medicine.
Another friend in film recruited Goyvaertz for a new project in Guatemala focusing on indigenous women. Though Goyvaertz said the experience resonated with the people in Guatemala and even “changed [his] life,” he came back to France and was disheartened to hear the French voiceover mistranslating what the indigenous woman was saying. Goyvaertz, dismayed by the carelessness of the misinterpretations, knew he wanted to create his own film organization to have more freedom and control over his work. In 1991, he established Milune Production.
Goyvaertz drew inspiration from French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch’s work in Africa and found himself drawn toward ethnographic filmmaking. He started concentrating his work in studying Guatemalan culture.
“When you study the local but you think about the global, you can think about and feel the local and global consequences,” Goyvaertz said.
He explored diverse indigenous and foreign perspectives in his “Filming Postwar Guatemala” series, which tells the different stories of the effects of international corporations on the indigenous Guatemalan people and territories. “My decision of having different voices is a complex approach,” Goyvaertz said.
To balance these different perspectives, Goyvaertz uses his interviewees’ accounts in juxtaposition. For “When the Earth Shines,” which shows the exploitation and reactions towards the gold mines in Guatemala, Goyvaertz compared multinational Ladino and indigenous Mayan opinions about the mining projects.
“Both had different approaches to the land and relationships with the mines … the Ladino territory thought maybe the mine would offer jobs,” he said.
However, the indigenous people working and using the land to build houses were resistant to the mining developments. To gain a corporate perspective, Goyvaertz tried asking the gold mining company manager for an interview, but never received a phone call in return.
Goyvaertz witnessed the impact of international involvement in Guatemala first hand throughout his years of filmmaking and interviewing. He interviewed an indigenous peasant farmer for “The Earth’s Essence,” who explains his newfound dependency on fertilizer after contractors first offered the product. Out of money to continue buying the fertilizer their fields now required, farmers would be forced to work on the large plantations.
Goyvaertz shared a peasant’s opinion on the corporation’s manipulation: “If you sell your land, you are selling your life. Then we are forced to work on these plantations and become slaves of the planter.”
There are no rules or methods for a day on the job besides an open mind and an open lens.
“I love to have a camera because I can be more reactive to situations. I like having my camera with me by my chest,” Goyvaertz said.
Characteristic of the cinéma vérité style of documentary filmmaking partly developed by Jean Rouch; Goyvaertz favors a handheld, moving camera with occasional shaky movements that infuse his stories with the utmost realism.
“I try to use my camera in a very moving way, trying to move it up and down and placing it on my shoulders,” Goyvaertz said.
Documentaries focus primarily on capturing life as it happens, with little to no embellishment of the footage, but Goyvaertz does not divert his eye from the beauty of natural simplicity. Goyvaertz remembers working on a film about coffee in Guatemala in which he filmed an indigenous family living in a wooden house in the mountains.
“The sunlight came into the space and I remember the emotion I felt,” Goyvaertz said. “There was a similarity in what I felt between the ideal image I had in mind for this situation and the reality I was witnessing in this moment. This moment touched me and I was almost crying … it was a moment that touched me and I kept. I always have this memory and emotion in my head.”
In his work, Goyvaertz aims to inform and create empathy among the public by spreading awareness about what is happening overseas. Since he was a child, Goyvaertz always had a passion for learning about different people and their lives.
“I’ve learned the importance of creating social sensibility and sharing the problems that international society is creating in the world,” Goyvaertz said.
He emphasized the importance of being open to different things instead of holding onto preconceived notions.
“I hope that we, as humans, can learn to leave the door open for opportunities in life,” Goyvaertz said. “It’s having a relationship with reality that is truly the beauty of documentary film.”
