SANTA MARÍA DE JESÚS, Guatemala — For her big
underwater scene in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”, Guatemalan actress María
Mercedes Coroy had to hold her breath as her character, Princess Fen, gives
birth in a hazy ocean world to a winged serpent son.
اضافة اعلان
She emerges from the watery depths as a rarity even in
Marvel’s fantastical universe: a female Maya superhero.
The day after filming her final scene in Los Angeles, Coroy,
rather than hanging out in Hollywood, headed home to Santa María de Jesús, a
Kaqchikel Maya town of about 22,000 at the base of a volcano in Guatemala. By
nightfall, she was curled up in bed in her family’s bright-pink cinder-block
house with vegetables growing in the backyard.
Guatemalan actress
María Mercedes Coroy, who plays Princess Fen in “Black Panther: Wakanda
Forever”, in her hometown of Santa María De Jesús, Guatemala, on February 3,
2023.
“I felt like my bed was hugging me,” said Coroy, 28, one of
nine siblings in a family of farmers and vendors.
The next morning, she resumed her usual life. She and her
mother put on their handwoven huipiles, or blouses, and cortes, or skirts, to
catch the 5:30 bus to the small city of Escuintla to sell produce in the
bustling market, a job she started after fifth grade when she had to drop out
of school to help her parents.
Some days, she walks two hours with a mule to the family
farm to cultivate cabbage and pumpkins. In her spare time, she weaves colorful
huipiles with motifs of birds and flowers on a backstrap loom.
“I love my life, but filming is physically demanding. This is my community.”
“People ask me what I do after filming,” said Coroy, who is
working on her third Guatemalan movie after appearing in two in the US. “I go
back to normal.”
Coroy represents a new generation of Maya actors determined
to hone their craft while holding onto their customs and helping expose a
legacy of discrimination against Guatemala’s Indigenous population.
Although she said she enjoys acting in the US — and posing
in a pink-and-blue huipil at the 2021 Golden Globe Awards — she is more interested
in her own country’s burgeoning film industry.
But whether she is working in her homeland or Hollywood,
acting can be draining, and she relies on Santa María de Jesús to recharge her.
“I love my life, but filming is physically demanding,” Coroy
said, relaxing on a bench in Santa María’s central park. “This is my
community.”
‘No longer amateur actors’Coroy’s first role was the lead in a school play production
of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.
Santa María de Jesus has long been locally famous for its
street theater, and a decade ago, Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante came to
town to prepare for his first feature film, “Ixcanul” (“Volcano”). He wanted to
tell a story of Maya women that addressed issues such as endemic poverty and
inequities in education and health care, and he was determined to cast Maya
actors speaking the Indigenous language of Kaqchikel.
Bustamante initially put up a sign in the town’s central
park: “Casting Here.” No one showed up. A few days later he posted: “Work Here.”
He was overwhelmed with prospective actors.
Coroy missed the audition. But a friend put her in touch
with the director the next day.
“He told me I was the only person who looked him in the eye,” she said. When he offered her the lead, she balked. “I had no experience. I was afraid I would ruin the movie.”
“He told me I was the only person who looked him in the
eye,” she said. When he offered her the lead, she balked. “I had no experience.
I was afraid I would ruin the movie.”
But he persuaded her to join the cast. For the next several
months, they trained at the country’s first film academy, founded by
Bustamante.
“When we began filming, they were no longer amateur actors,”
Bustamante said.
“Ixcanul”, which won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 65th
Berlin International Film Festival, focuses on a poor family in the mountains
that arranges for the daughter to marry a plantation overseer. The daughter
secretly gets involved with a young man — a drunk and a dreamer — who promises
to take her with him to the US. But he leaves without her and she finds herself
pregnant while still engaged to the other man.
After she gives birth in a hospital, a staff member tells
her that her baby has died. When the young woman finds out later that her child
had lived and had possibly been sold for adoption, grief consumes her.
“Quiet and fearless,” Los Angeles-based film critic Manuel
Betancourt wrote of Coroy’s understated performance, which revealed anguish
behind a still face.
Spirituality and cultureShe has recently begun delving into Maya spirituality. Her
grandmother was a natural healer who taught her about the curative properties
or herbal teas and flowers. Although she worships in a Catholic church, she
also studies with an Indigenous spiritual teacher and reads the Maya creation
story, the Popol Vuh.
“There’s no movie star culture here,” Coroy said. “There are no paparazzi.”
Central to Maya religion is Maximón, a trickster deity both
benevolent and hedonistic. In ceremonies, adherents smoke and drink in front of
his wooden figure in the hopes he will hear their entreaties. Coroy attends
ceremonies without imbibing, she said.
“I respect Maximón,” she said. “I have connected with him in
dreams. He said, ‘You neither speak well of me nor poorly, so I will protect
you.’”
Although she is famous enough in Guatemala that people in
the colonial tourist city of Antigua, a UNESCO World heritage site, approach
her politely for autographs, her neighbors in Santa María avoid singling her
out. Walking in the town’s park, she might as well be any other vendor.
“There’s no movie star culture here,” Coroy said. “There are
no paparazzi.”
Read more Odd and Bizarre
Jordan News