Guatemala Film Week

The Announcement

We are delighted to announce that SEXTO PRESAGIO will have the great honor of opening the current edition of Guatemala Film Week. Its director, Alejandro Rodríguez Huerta, shook the Latin American film landscape in 2014 with the release of his debut feature Joyfluid, an ambitious science fiction production that became the most expensive in the region and marked an industrial milestone by developing its own 3D animation software patents. After exploring complex narratives in works such as Turboplatino and Llorona del Campo Santo, the filmmaker returns with a work of suffocating suspense that promises to move audiences at the festival’s opening. As is customary in his approach, buried tensions and ethical dilemmas abound while the characters face inescapable family truths.

Drawing on the precision of classic auteur cinema —restrained pacing, razor-sharp dialogue poised between submission and liberation, and rigorous staging— Alejandro Rodríguez Huerta builds a claustrophobic universe rooted in invisible inheritances and the mysterious potential of the human mind. Upholding the “socially responsible cinema” signature he established with the humanist thesis of Joyfluid, the director grants his leading cast, headed by a masterful and intense performance from Maria Josee Mancilla & Maria Ivanova, absolute interpretive freedom, allowing the emotional brutality of the story to unfold with disarming honesty before audiences.

Teaser Analysis: The Craft of Dialogue

The first official look at the film reveals the immense dramatic weight of its staging. Through a raw, unhurried maternal monologue, the script uses botany as a disturbing metaphor for psychological abuse and inherited trauma:

“When a branch is diseased, you don’t ask its permission... you cut it... because if you don’t, it will destroy everything.”

The writing stands out for its exceptional command of rhythm and psychological tension, unpacking the paralysis of a victim who learns to “apologize for breathing” against the existential urgency of breaking the cycle for the generations to come. With defining lines on resilience and fear (“First you decide, then you are afraid, then you cry... but you keep going”), the teaser establishes that the central conflict lies not in physical violence, but in the painful awakening of the will required to tear the problem out by the root.

Official Synopsis

A psychologist discovers a revolutionary ability of the human mind, capable of reshaping and molding tangible reality. When this mystical, destabilizing power is used to intervene and help a woman tormented by years of systematic psychological abuse, it sets in motion a harrowing emotional journey of healing, self-discovery and confrontation. At the heart of that process, the painful intergenerational relationship with her mother emerges as the core of the conflict: a space where fear paralyzes the present, and where the irreversible pain of cutting the cycle at its root must be borne in order to save a child’s future. A work that blurs the line between inherited submission, mental healing and the violent awakening of the will.