What local activists are calling “femicide” in Guatemala, where 6,000 women have been murdered in the last decade, is the topic of a film and discussion at the University of St. Thomas.
The multiple-award-winning documentary “Justice for My Sister” will be shown at 7 p.m. Monday, April 15, in Room 126 of the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts on the university’s St. Paul campus.
The film will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Kimberly Bautista, its producer and director. “My hope is that audiences from all walks of life will be moved to recognize the violence in our own communities and take a stand against it,” she said.
Adela at age 27.
The program is free and open to the public. The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. The discussion with Bautista will be translated from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish.
The feature-length documentary begins with the story of a 27-year-old Guatemalan, Adela, who left for work one day and never returned. Her ex-boyfriend beat her until she was unrecognizable and left her at the side of road.
Despite dismal odds, Adela’s sister Rebeca takes on Guatemala’s corrupt legal system in a three-year fight to bring the ex-boyfriend to justice. Of the 6,000 cases of women murdered in Guatemala over the past decade, only 2 percent of their killers were sentenced.
A trailer for the film can be seen here.
The April 15 program includes the sale of Guatemalan crafts; free-will offerings will be accepted. Checks may be made out to La Paz International Inc. All proceeds go to provide financial support for Rebeca, the subject of the film, and Olga, another Guatemalan woman who lives with her children in poverty.
The program is co-sponsored by St. Thomas’ College of Arts and Sciences, Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion Services, Luann Dummer Center for Women, and the departments of History, Political Science, Women’s Studies, Family Studies, Justice and Peace Studies, Modern and Classical Languages, and Sociology.
