EL LUGAR MÁS PEQUEÑO

To walk into the jungle-shrouded village of Cinquera, El Salvador, is to enter a world where ghosts walk, passing back and forth between the past and present. Here, decades after a brutal civil war annihilated the village, survivors return to bury their dead and rebuild the community from the ashes. During the 1980–92 civil war, Cinquera was invaded by the National Guard, which targeted it as a potential haven for guerrillas of the FMLN opposition. Cinquera was literally wiped off the map, disappearing temporarily from official charts in a conflict that resulted in 80,000 deaths with tens of thousands more disappeared. We see the result of that devastation on the resolute and composed survivors now sowing new seeds in Tatiana Huezo Sánchez’s stunning debut feature. In an unobtrusive portrait of collective memory, we mingle with villagers as they recall horrifying ordeals of rape, mutilation and torture.