A meditation on attempts to film a smuggler in the Peten Jungle of Guatemala. The smuggler, an ex-inmate of Dachau, refuses to be filmed except at a distance. The filmmaker's pursuit along jungle roads and through Mayan ruins leads to the discovery of the true subject of the film.
All proceeds from screening go directly into the Peter Thompson Scholarship Fund that benefits Photography and Cinema Art + Science students at Columbia College, Chicago.
Peter Thompson (1944–2013) was an American director who made six films.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, a film journalist and a good friend of Thompson, was writing after his death: “It would hardly be an exaggeration to call Peter Thompson the best Chicago filmmaker you never heard of. Pertinent to all six films are diverse aspects of Thomson’s background: as a classical guitarist who studied with Andrès Segovia in Siena, as an undergraduate and graduate student in comparative literature (University of California, Irvine), as a onetime Navy photojournalist who teaches photography at Columbia College Chicago, and even as a first cousin of the special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull. All six films are troubled and troubling meditations on history and epic efforts of research and retrieval, concerned simultaneously with the shape of entire lives and with fleeting experiences.”
Two Portraits (1982), Universal Hotel (1986), Universal Citizen (1987), Lowlands (2009)
