Output details
36 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
University of the West of Scotland
A Massacre Foretold (Television broadcasts, DVD & Spanish & Italian Version release) VPRO (the Netherlands) & YLE (Finland)
60 min. documentary
This practice-based research output builds on Higgins’ monograph, Understanding the Chiapas Rebellion: Modernist Visions and the Invisible Indian (first published by the University of Texas Press in 2004). Continuing his investigation into the dynamics that engender cultural (in)visibility as presented in the book, Dr Higgins adapts his methodology to explore the affective possibilities that can be achieved through the creative practices of documentary filmmaking.
The intellectual question of how best to achieve a cultural, political and emotional understanding of a heavily mediatized and ethically complex event such as the massacre at Acteal, was what drove the research project. Dr. Higgins had interviewed survivors from the massacre as early as 1998 during his original fieldwork in Mexico and had felt frustrated by the limitations of the academic text to communicate the experience of this very particular Mayan Tzotzil community. This experience is related in the text, ‘Tell Our Story to the World’ in Film Festivals and Activism, (St. Andrews College Gate Press, 2012).
Gathering original footage, researching news and private archives, and most importantly gaining the full trust of the community in Acteal involved over 5 years of research and 5 separate field trips supported by various grants from the British Academy and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation amongst others.
Finding a cinematic language that could both communicate the cultural particularities and emotional sensitivities by which the Acteal survivors experienced the event whilst equally revealing the clandestine governmental machinations behind the creation of the paramilitary perpetrators of the crime was a the principal research challenge.
The final feature length documentary premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, screened at over 40 international festivals, has been broadcast on 4 international television stations and has received distribution in Europe and the USA. It was also awarded the best Human Rights Documentary Award in 2008.
