César Diaz's story is that of a Guatemalan political exile, fresh from winning the Caméra d'Or award at Cannes in 2019. Born in 1978 in a country in the midst of armed conflict, he was forced to travel to Mexico to study art and cinema. He then joined the FEMIS (French National Graduate School of Image and Sound Professions) scriptwriting workshop in Paris, and specialised in editing. For some ten years, he has worked between Paris and Brussels as a director, scriptwriter and editor. César Diaz has produced two documentaries in which he addresses the issue, central to him, of civil war in his country: Semillas de Cenizas (2010) and Territorio Liberado (2014). 2019 marks the release of his first feature-length fiction film, Nuestras Madres, selected for the 58th Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival.

The director recalls the 36 years of civil war that engulfed Guatemala until 1996. His mastery of the art of documentary allows him to “name things so that they become real”. It builds tangible stories, supported by the strength of the testimonies of those who still bear the stigma of a troubled past. Bolstered by the testimonies of women who survived the massacre of a village on the Guatemalan highlands, he decided to shoot his first fiction film, Nuestras Madres (2019), presented at Critics’ Week at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, for which he received the prestigious Caméra d’Or award for best first work, and the SACD prize. A tribute to “the 250,000 victims of this genocide and all the women who remain standing and give us a huge lesson in life”.

César Diaz has won awards at several international festivals such as the Berlinale (Germany), the Montreal World Film Festival (Canada), the Biarritz International Audiovisual Programme Festival (France), the Amsterdam International Film Festival (Netherlands) and the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland). César Diaz predicts that Guatemalan cinema will open up to the world: “The time has come when people say to each other in Guatemala: "We know how to make films". This is a historic moment since Ixcanul (2015) by Jayro Bustamante paved the way for Guatemalan cinema.