Endangered Languages: Silvestre Pantaleon Endangered Languages
go to original September 2, 2012

Silvestre Pantaleon in Nahuatl (Aztec) with English subtitles

Silvestre Pantaleón is the narrative of an unusual man playing a familiar role in a simple though universal tale of aging. It juxtaposes the possibility of triumph (the household sustained and health recovered) with the certitude of reversal (healing as but an ephemeral hiatus in the inexorable advance of time).

The story begins as a local curandero reads the protagonist’s fortune and diagnoses the costly remedy to his ills: a complex series of offerings to the hearth, the ants, the river, and the deceased. Silvestre Pantaleon then struggles to pull together the money needed to pay for the curing ceremony and provide for his family, dedicating himself to the only remunerative activities he knows: handcrafting rope for religious ceremonies and making seldom-used household objects that he alone still has the skills to produce.

Silvestre Pantaleón - a collaboration between an anthropologist and a filmmaker - unfolds with no interviews or narration. Rather, scenes from daily life are woven together in rich ethnographic detail and lingering imagery that explore a rural community situated in the shadow of a highway bridge to the international resort of Acapulco. Over this bridge pass thousands of tourists, oblivious to the village life just below yet worlds apart.

The movie has won numerous awards, among them the following: Best Feature-length Mexican Documentary (9th Morelia International Film Festival); Gran Prix Tehuikan (best film, all categories; 21st Montreal First Peoples' Festival); and Premio  360° (Principal prize; DocsDF, VI Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de la Ciudad de México). It will be also played at the UN's Millenium Documentary Film festival in Brussels.

Producer, codirector: Jonathan D Amith • Director: Roberto Olivares Ruiz

Jonathan D Amith (Ph.D. Anthropology, Yale University, 2000) is an anthropologist, linguist and historian presently working on documenting three endangered languages: 1) Nahuatl spoken in San Agustín Oapan, Guerrero; 2) Nahuatl spoken in San Miguel Tzinacapan, Sierra Norte de Puebla, Puebla; and 3) Mixtec spoken in Yoloxóchitl, Costa Chica de Guerrero.

Born in Mexico City January 26, 1967. Graduated from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Social Communication, specializing in film and television. He has dedicated more than fifteen years to television and documentary production, especially in Indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

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