For those of you who are new to the project, perhaps recently bullied by me into becoming a “fan” of a film you can’t yet see and have never even heard of ‘til now – this is the story of how it came to be:

In 2007, after my short educational documentary Chocolate Country (astonishingly, despite a festival win) failed to bring instant fame and fortune, I decided that going into debt to make a feature film would be more fun than going into debt to get a graduate degree. Chocolate Country is a careful, quiet little piece, and this time I was itching to do something on an exaggerated, almost cartoonish scale. I began to research a project about the John Frum cargo cult, a group of pacific islanders who worship a gift-bearing sorcerer who may be a US air force captain. Though I knew little about anthropology at the time, I was drawn to the story because I liked the idea of the United States as a faraway spirit-world of magic rites and hidden forces. But as fate would have it, another Brooklyn filmmaker was already making that film. And he sounded even crazier than me.

That’s when my subletter, Jocelyn, told me about her professor Rhonda Taube – a Visual Culture scholar at UCSD who was researching the disfraz dances in Momostenango, Guatemala. Unlike the folkloric dances popular with tourists, these performances mixed Mayan ritual with imagery from global pop culture – “Indigenous villagers dressed up as the Simpsons” as Jocelyn put it. Here was another chance to imagine the USA as a land of myth and magic, and so much cheaper to fly to than Vanuatu! Rhonda was generous and liked the idea of a film, and the photos and writings she emailed were eerily fascinating. She would soon become an advisor, a friend, and even a crew member, and she also got me in touch with anthropologists Maury Hutcheson (the first westerner to write about the disfraz), who quickly became the film’s resident expert on traditional dances, and Garrett Cook, whose book “Renewing the Maya World” served as my crash course in Momostenango – its enduring links to pre-Columbian religion, and its hallucinatory dance-theatre tradition. I began to piece together a story. A month later, in October of 2007, I was on a plane to Guatemala.

Though the Maya of Momostenango are a modern, savvy people, resourceful, adaptable and curious about the wider world, decades of brutal war had severely limited their access to foreign media and technology. After the peace accord of 1996, things began to move fast. Walking through the marketplace, I saw old men burning offerings to ancestral spirits, while teenage punk rockers snapped photos on their phones. Shopkeepers adorned their walls with hand-painted tributes to Guns and Roses, and girls in traditional hand-woven skirts posed to get their snapshot taken before banners of the late World Trade Center. It was like watching 400 years of history squished into a day. And then somehow, like a holy fool, with only my high school Spanish to guide me, I managed to stumble upon a small barrio disfraz. The effect of encountering a kid-sized Chucky from Child’s Play bopping his way down a dusty country road was every bit as unsettling and dazzling a vision as I could have hoped for. The hand-crafted fiberglass masks were incredible, more lifelike than real faces. It wasn’t just like Halloween, or Mardi Gras – something very strange was going on.

I made another exploratory trip in January of 2008 – enlisting some new friends from a nearby youth hostel to help me trek around in search of Mayan priests and mask-makers who would be willing to share their work and ideas with prying strangers. By July, I’d teamed up with producer, cinematographer and one-woman-band Elyse Neiman, and assembled a ragtag crew of heroes. Together we descended on the town during the madness of their Patron Saint’s day festival – two of the most interesting weeks I’ve ever experienced anywhere.

We began to edit over the winter, created some early scenes and a trailer, and went back to capture more of the festival the next summer, where this time the dances featured two Barack Obamas and a Heath Ledger batman. Now, though it seems kind of backwards, we’ve actually entered a new research phase, stockpiling archival footage and reading up on history. Inspired by Adam Curtis, a BBC film essayist I discovered and became obsessed with mid-way through the project, we plan to use key moments in the past to illuminate this strange present.

So that about catches you up. Now I look to you, dear reader, for suggestions and support, as we enter the final stages.  Expect more scenes-in-progress over the next month!

Yours,

Robin