Maya Are People

Year Published: 1951

Creator: Simmel-Meservey

Format: 16mm

Color: Color

Sound: sound

Description: Many explorer-adventurer hosts of historical/cultural films viewed their subjects as "objects" (e.g. C. Ernest Cadle and Carveth Wells), their colonialist attitudes seeping precariously through the safety-film. Not so the wonderful and forgotten Les Mitchel, who arrives in the Lacandon area of the Yucatan, shows the chief Obregon K’in (of Agua Azul village, Palenque) how to fire a pistol, takes him on a plane-ride to view his ancestral ruins at Palenque. Much of this magnificent film was shot at Lacanha Chan Sayab. Viewers can find much to like about this filmmaker-adventurer, lost to history. Overly-sensitive individuals will be put-off, no doubt at Mitchel’s politically-incorrect use of cigarette-as-tool, burning the leave of a jungle plant to show its reflex to heat. At the end of the film, Mitchel delivers a heartfelt plea to save the culture from encroachment. All our attempts at finding any information on the filmmaker have failed.