Screening

Year Released:
2011
Genres:
Documentary, Drama
Metadata:
Directed by Jeffrey Gould, Carlos Henriquez Consalvi

During the early 1970s, hundreds of peasants in a remote, backward region of El Salvador decided to emulate the early Christian communities. Inspired by Liberation Theology, they worked the land together, studied the Bible, and strove to improve their impoverished communities. Their numbers grew into the thousands. By 1980, the National Guard staged scorched earth operations to rid the area of these same people. La Palabra en el Bosque (the Word in the Woods) explores these events through the narratives of their surviving witnesses.

The film emphasizes the utopian aspects of the Christian Base Communities – their highly developed communitarian and egalitarian qualities -- more than the heroism of the guerrillas. In so doing it suggests that those roots are perhaps most compelling today in a world where utopian thought and deep collective experiences have been banished to dustbin marked archaic.

Director Jeffrey Gould is scheduled to be present.

(HD Cam presentation, English and Spanish languages with English subtitles)

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