The Movie.
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Through cycles of destruction and rebirth, the fall of Iximulew (Guatemala) is not portrayed as an ending, but as a wound that continues to speak.
Narrated entirely in Kaqchikel, the film positions language as a living force: a carrier of memory, resistance, and ancestral presence. The voice does not explain history; it mourns, remembers, and summons. From within darkness, it affirms an enduring feminine strength that survives collapse and re-emerges through ritual, landscape, and breath.
What emerges is a reminder that renewal is not an exception to loss, but its inevitable companion.
Production Notes.
The making of The Soothsayer & the Jaguar was guided by intuition, immersion, and lived presence rather than by script or predetermined structure. Filming unfolded as an open process, shaped by encounters with landscape, sound, and ritual rather than by narrative goals.
The production embraced ambiguity, allowing images and sounds to surface organically. Decisions around framing, duration, and movement emerged in response to internal states and atmospheric conditions, privileging feeling over explanation. Meaning is not translated literally but transmitted emotionally.
The use of both black-and-white and color developed intuitively during the process, responding to shifts in breath, memory, and emotional density rather than symbolic coding. Editing followed an associative logic, mirroring the way memory resurfaces—fragmented, repetitive, and nonlinear. Sound design blurred the boundaries between voice, environment, and inner reflection, creating an immersive field where narration, landscape, and silence coexist without hierarchy.
At its core, The Soothsayer & the Jaguar is an act of listening—listening to language, to land, and to what persists after devastation. The decision to narrate entirely in Kaqchikel was not aesthetic, but ethical and spiritual: an acknowledgment of language as a vessel of resistance and continuity rather than a tool for explanation.
"The Maya worldview collapses past and present. By filming the landscape as a living archive, we allow the audience to engage with cultural trauma and continuity through texture and sound rather than verbal justification."
The Heart of
the Production
What appears on screen is the residue of waiting, listening, and accepting that meaning often arrives long after the moment has passed.
This film does not attempt to preserve the past; it recognizes that the past is still alive. Through transcendental adventure and poetic immersion, The Soothsayer & the Jaguar becomes a meditation on endurance—on how cultures, voices, and spirits survive collapse by transforming, returning, and refusing to disappear.
The voice does not instruct the viewer where to look or what to think—it opens a space. In that space, memory moves freely, grief lingers without explanation, and resistance exists not as declaration but as continuity.
This work became an act of acceptance-that the film would reveal itself only when it was ready, and only as much as it chose to reveal.