Synopsis

"The Killing of Diogenes" is a story of a boy, P, an 8-year-old living in Guatemala City, and P's efforts to break free from his dysfunctional family. In his home, P is surrounded by violence; he lacks for loving attention. P's mother, Delfina, escapes reality by compulsively crocheting. P's father, Don Paco, has a drinking problem, and is all but absent from the house. Whenever Don Paco does return to their home, however, he creates an unpleasant scene, terrorizing P and Delfina. As the story develops, the narrative shifts between P and Don Paco, and we witness the action from both points of view.

The juxtaposition of these narratives, marked by elements of fantastic excess, evokes the layered realities of magical-realism, in which the marvelous coexists, unremarkably, with the banalities of the everyday. "The Killing of Diogenes" is adapted from the short story "...y Diogenes tambien," by Guatemalan author Augusto Monterroso, and is dedicated to his memory. Utilizing a sophisticated visual language to describe multiple, overlapping realities, "The Killing of Diogenes" recasts Monterroso's short story as an allegory of Guatemala during its thirty-year long civil war, and the struggle of the urban ladino middle-class to come to terms with the violence done against indigenous peoples in the countryside.

Putting aside the conventions of agitprop drama and utilizing the expressive gestures of magical-realism, Mario Rosales casts P's story as a lens upon the larger social and political forces shaping Guatemala, and the forms of everyday cultural resistance through which people struggle to give meaning to their lives. In Rosales' realization, the violence of P's life reflects the violence of the civil war, just as P's attempts to understand the violence in his family suggests the ongoing effort to comprehend the horror of the war, and the more than 200,000 who were killed. Indeed, such efforts at understanding, at overcoming violence and trauma, consume each of the characters in the film. Trying to convince themselves of the reality of place and time in a country violated by international corporate marauders and, consequently, torn by war, Dan Paco and Delfina retreat into complementary forms of compulsive, repetitive behavior, while P and his mentors endeavor to find meaning in the creative, the beautiful and the sublime. From this perspective, Don Paco's alcoholism and Delfina's religious discipline suggest the grave social and psychic consequences of the civil war, just as P's search for beauty reveals a spirit that will not be crushed. Together, these characters and their stories paint an elegantly multifaceted portrait of contemporary, post-war Guatemala in its quest for resolution and reconciliation.