Two filmmakers spent months filming the turmoil in Honduras.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Katia Lara and Carlos del Valle grabbed their cameras last June and started shooting: protesters gathered on the Tegucigalpa streets, soldiers firing live rounds into crowds.
They filmed for five months, starting the day the Honduran military kidnapped then-President Manuel Zelaya and kicked him out of the country. They captured shocking images of soldiers beating up journalists and arresting children.
“We found out about the coup from CNN, since the local news stations were all playing cartoons or soccer games,” Valle said.
The police stole their cameras twice, and a number of the people in the film were killed. And so, in December, Lara fled the country for Buenos Aires. Valle followed a month later.
Here in this southern megalopolis, the two have been editing their feature documentary film, "Quien Dijo Miedo: Honduras de un golpe" (rough English translation: "No Fear Here: Inside the Coup in Honduras").
The central narrative thread of the film is of a young Honduran anti-coup activist, who eventually seeks exile in Spain after a bomb is placed under his girlfriend’s car.
Lara and Valle shot hundreds of hours of footage all over the country, and hope their film will help reveal the violence unleashed by the coup, and the illegitimacy of the post-coup elections — in which more than 60 percent of the electorate abstained from voting.
As far as they know, Lara and Valle are the only filmmakers who have a feature film on the topic.
"Quien Dijo Miedo" premieres here at a special screening on June 7, in a major cinema that seats 800. Valle will then go on to present the film in Bolivia and Chile later that month, and Lara will present it in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and in the United States in July.
“The two places we thought we could finish the film were in Mexico or Argentina, since both countries have strong film industries,” Valle said. Lara had also lived in both Mexico and Argentina before and, among other considerations, Argentina’s outspoken stance against the coup helped them decide to seek exile here.
“The U.S. didn’t even call it a coup, whereas barely three hours passed after the military kidnapped the president that Cristina [Argentina’s president] came out to denounce it. We thought here maybe we’d get a more hospitable reaction,” said Lara.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/the-americas/100527/movie-honduras-coup
