A Place Called Chiapas

In 1994 the Zapatista National Liberation Army took five towns and five hundred ranches in southern Mexico. The army was made up largely of impoverished Mayan peasants from the state of Chiapas. The government sent in troops and at least a hundred and forty five people died in the fighting that followed. The director Nettie Wild went into the jungle canyons of the country to film the uprising where it was. The documentary records the daily life of that movement, at once elusive and fragile. The account does not watch from a distance; it moves through the canyons. It was shot in the years after the rising, while the rising was still going on. Nettie Wild’s Canadian and Mexican coproduction, ninety three minutes long, was completed in 1998.