Haunted Land (review)
The construction and reconstruction of memory is an attempt to make sense of the past, and it is particularly important when it is an especially violent past. Haunted Land follows a massacre survivor, Mateo Pablo, from his snow-bound home in Canada to his return for the first time to the 1982 massacre site of Petanac in highland Guatemala. He travels with photographer Daniel Hernandez-Salazar and a forensic team, unearthing the remains of families in mass graves. Mary Ellen Sacrée guides us through the meticulous forensic reconstruction of what the corpses tell us: the separation of the women from the men, the killing of the children by blunt force, the raping, the machine-gunning, the grenade-throwing into the houses, and the burning of the entire village. Thirty-eight people were killed in all, many under the age of 12. There are survivors, too, who are photographed as another kind of witness, as evidence of the terror. Their still photographs, etched into our memories, bear witness to the transfer of the bones to the new cemetery and become art forms in themselves. Mateo Pablo lays a stone on the mass grave, as do the others, in solemn silence.