Violence pervades life in Guatemala. Just leaving your house involves a real danger of being attacked or becoming a victim of violent crime. Throughout the country, all day and all night. Many citizens have armed themselves, and it doesn't take much to provoke acts of violence. Human life is not worth much.
While such problems are common in numerous Central and South American countries, the situation in Guatemala is much worse. Furthermore, the country has to contend with the horrible legacy of a 36- year civil war and wholesale killing of its indigenous population. A hike in the picturesque Highlands will take the visitor through a number of villages where descendants of the Maya live on what their modest plots of land produce. When speaking with locals, certain phrases are heard again and again: "Here in our village 50 people were killed and buried back there." And: "They burned them all alive." Vast

numbers of people were murdered here - and the world looked away. While Rwanda, Darfur and Srebrenica caused an international outcry, the fate of Guatemala's indigenous population aroused little interest.
I asked myself whether there's some kind of connection between the genocide and the violence of today. Why "Evolution of violence"? When the first Europeans arrived in the New World, they created societies based on extremely unjust social orders. While in many areas entire native populations were exterminated (e.g. in the USA), the descendants of the Maya represent the majority in Guatemala. The unfair and exploitative structures, however, never changed. A society like that is destined to live in continual violence. And all attempts to change this order have been hindered with the aid of the USA and Europe. Guatemala is considered the archetype of a banana republic. This term designates countries where banana exporters are so powerful that they are in fact in control. Whoever opposes their interests is often simply liquidated. Bananas symbolize a world order turned upside down, in which the majority sweats and slaves to create wealth for a small minority. In this film bananas also serve to create a link back to Europe.

In my opinion Guatemala provides an example of a global ideology according to which economic exploitation is veiled by cynical political rhetoric. The film shows archival footage of a speech given by Ronald Reagan. By replacing the word "Communism" with "terrorism" and, in a different clip, switching "bananas" to "oil," the spectator is brought to the armed conflicts of our time. "Evolution of Violence" goes a step further to examine a society after a conflict has ended, or more precisely: to examine a culture of continual conflict. I'm convinced that a similar film could be made about Iraq in 30 years, after the exploitation of a different resource justified by a different political pretext in a different part of the world has come to an end, when the Iraqis are finally left to themselves, all the TV cameras are gone, and the violence has taken on its own life.

Fritz Ofnerf the space in newspapers, and they were the most common theme of TV news reports. I approached a broadcaster and asked whether I could ride along with its journalists to document their daily work. My presence was immediately met with a great deal of openness there too, and I was given an opportunity and permission to accompany these journalists with my camera.

This reminded me of what soldiers told me, that the only way to survive or recover psychologically from the horrors of war is through comradeship. Right away I felt that it worked in the same way with these journalists. You're constantly confronted with these extremely traumatic situations, and comradeship within the group is what gets you through it all. I experienced that myself, and I think my film conveys it to a certain extent: This laughter, this joking, that's not cynicism, it's a survival technique for dealing with this difficult-to-deal-with reality.

The social worker is employed by the country's most important organization, which deals with violence done to women and gives them a voice. In Guatemala violence on women is a huge topic, and people speak of femicide. I introduced my project to them and was welcomed immediately - again because my film bears witness. The violence of the civil war is similar to the violence in the country's present: They're both covered up, and aren't dealt with. The justice system doesn't work, and 97 out of 100 murders go unpunished; in other words only 3% of all murderers are convicted. When I visited mothers whose daughters were killed, they welcomed me into their lives in spite of my camera, because I bore witness here too. What happened isn't forgotten when a camera records it, and it reaches an audience—this hope was there the entire time. With this approach I was able to film many scenes that were extremely intimate and sad, because this desire to bear witness had always been there. The most difficult thing was finding a soldier, a war criminal, who was willing to appear on camera and talk about his crime. I talked to a large number of soldiers, but none of them wanted to go on camera, because they were afraid of getting killed themselves. Then I put an ad in a newspaper, and a few people answered it. One of these men became the film's protagonist. He wrote a book that still hasn't been published. He wrote down his story in order to work out this trauma, including from the perpetrator's perspective. In a way he wanted to externalize this story, to put it on display, to free himself from it a little bit.

The government hasn't shown any interest in clearing up the past. What's the feeling among the population?
Fo: I think that there's a major fault line in the country's society, and the two fronts from the civil war haven't grown back together yet. Many people who now work in the cultural field or for NGOs in Guatemala belonged to the guerillas during the civil war. In other words they were all leftists, and they still are. The people in power, who possess the economic and political power today, backed the military dictatorship. So the conflict has never been worked out because that wouldn't be in the interest of the groups in power.

There probably isn't a single family in Guatemala that doesn't have victims or perpetrators. But there's a great deal of effort to repress memories of the violence committed during the civil war, and this repression continues to feed the spiral of violence. The violence of the present day is often even worse than while the fighting was taking place, which is the reason for the film's title, "Evolution of Violence." Of course, there's also a powerful movement among intellectuals, and the left wing, and also grassroots organizations that wants to examine the past.
For example, in the scene with the self-help group and the 15-year-old girls who were raped, you can see clearly that a lot of them don't know what happened during the civil war taking place when they were born.
Will the film be screened in Guatemala?

Fo: Yes, definitely. I tried to make the production process in Guatemala extremely transparent. For example, I screened the rough cut for university students - that was really exciting. I expected that ten or twenty people would come, and suddenly there was an audience of 100 in the lecture hall. I showed clips from the film, and they triggered some passionate discussions. That the film started discussion is important in Guatemala.
I also screened it for Guatemalan filmmakers, which was extremely interesting too, because I was told that the people there are so used to violence that they weren't really conscious of it until they saw the film, and they tended not to notice it in their daily lives. An outsider's view helped them see the obvious connections between the civil war and everyday violence.

Several times I showed rough cuts in Guatemala to start discussions, and I wanted to see whether my view from the outside would be accepted. The film was accepted, and people said: "We want the film too!" The finished film will have a theatrical release there.