Daniel is a handsome, indigenous working-class Guatemalan teenager who is ordinary in every way except one: he possesses outstanding soccer skills. With his prowess on the field, he gains entry into a very privileged world: an upper-middle class, white world of private clubs, money, and girls. But Daniel’s sudden good fortune has a dark side – for sport, his new friend Tony leads his pack of friends around the city with baseball bats, hunting (and sometimes even killing) the indigenous kids of Daniel’s neighborhood. Daniel is now expected to join in on these attacks in order to maintain his new social status as one of the elites – and Daniel suddenly finds the price of assimilation is much steeper than he ever anticipated.
Filmmaker Sergio Ramirez’s long-awaited second feature film has a blistering urgency: he brings to light one of the 20th century’s most unreported and unpunished genocides – that of hundreds of indigenous young men murdered with impunity in the late ’80s and ’90s in Guatemala. The story of Daniel and Tony, frisky teenagers caught up in a complex web of societal racism, homophobia, and class struggle, brings to life a chapter of history that cannot be allowed to be swept under the carpet of purposeful forgetting.
1991 bristles with energy, purpose, and intention. It’s essential, essential viewing – one of the most important films of recent years.
Sergio Ramirez is a filmmaker from Guatemala. His first feature Distancia (2012) won several international awards and had its US premiere at Miami Film Festival. 1991 (2021), produced by the Oscar-shortlisted filmmaker Jayro Bustamante (La Llorona), is Ramirez’s second film.
Supported by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, sponsored by WarnerMedia, Oolite Arts, FlixLatino, ViendoMovies available with Xfinity, and Alacran Group.