Director, Pamela Yates, shoots her documentary, "When the Mountains Tremble", in different styles in order to tell her story. She portrays her antagonist group, the Guatemalan Government in various sequences of black and white footage. Some scenes are probably just old footage, but other scenes seem to be shot with the intent of black and white frames. Such scenes include footage of Guatemalan Government officials whom try to persuade the public how the rebel guerillas are acting out against the community's best interests. The style seems to hint to its audience that the footage is not truthful, but rather governmental propaganda.
Yates then transitions to colorful frames to show the reality of the Guatemalan people. Their reality is dictated by a military, which uses their presence to enforce fear into the community. Fear enforces the powerful's power, as well as forces the "peasant" people off their lands and away from their natural resources. Fear forces these people to work in a slave labor economy, where their living and health conditions are poor in the rural communities that they live in. Fear controls these people, physically and mentally.
Just like the autonomous zone group in Chiapas, México, El Municipio Rebelde Ernesto Che Guevara, the Guatemalans resort to the mountains where they free themselves from an imperial government, and where they can train and organize in revolution. The black and white images call these communities communists, and they say perceive these accusations as evil ideologies. However, Yates displays a people whom come together and help one another survive the day. Yates shows a people whom struggle every day, but also a people who care about one another, and a people whom treat each other as equals.
Yates then shows the soldiers who act in the government's interests. They are clueless to what they are fighting for. They say that they are merely committing their duties, but, the duties entail burning down communities, and killing anyone whom they think have guerilla affiliation.
In a Zapatista declaration, a Zapatista states, "The peace that some are now seeking was always war for us. It seems that the great lords of the land, business, industry, and money are bothered that the indians are going to die in the cities and stain the streets that until now were dirtied only by the wrappings of imported products. They prefer that indians die in the mountains, far away from the good consciousness and tourists (Pathologies of Power Pg. 99-100). " The Zapatista is saying that the world is closed off to the suffering that the Mexican peasants endure. The government as well as the powerful in Chiapas disclose all this information of war so that they won't scare off their investors. Yates shows a stem of the world's misconceptions with American footage of President Ronald Reagan urging for the American people to help and fund the Guatemalan Government in their fights against the communist rebels. Americans are lead to believe that they are helping a struggling people, however, in reality, the funding protects the interests of the imperial, as well as contributes to the struggle of the repressed.
The most powerful images of the film, is when Yates displays the images of the Guatemalan children's drawings. These are images of soldiers who are burning down houses, and killing indigenous people. Each soldier is colored in green crayon, and each soldier is acting violently and inhumanely. The illustrations are significant because they are not devices of opinions, persuasion, or propaganda, but more of a reality that the Guatemalan children see and live through everyday. The images are a reality that the rest of the world will never see, or at the very least, see in misconception. However, Yates uses her style in filming and editing so that she could show the real lives of the Guatemalan people, as well as bring awareness to an educated audience.
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