Director
En El Salvador a Monseñor Oscar Romero se le conocía como "la voz de los sin voz", la voz de los desposeídos, de los campesinos, de todos los que luchaban por los derechos humanos y en contra de la injusticia. Era un hombre de provincia, retraído y de corta estatura. Cuando las autoridades religiosas y laicas lo designaron para el arzobispado de San Salvador, la capital, tenían la plena expectativa de que desempeñaría el papel tradicional de la jerarquía eclesiástica: apoyar al gobierno y sostener el estatus quo. Este desacierto cambiaría la historia de El Salvador. La película relata la historia de los tres años de liderazgo de Monseñor Romero en la iglesia salvadoreña. También fueron los últimos tres años de su vida.
Associate Producer
Jeannie Donovan, a party-girl searching for that something missing in her life, finds it in El Salvador, hooking up with three nuns and a heartful of ache, love, and horror in the midst of a civil war. This is a true story of the four American churchwomen murdered in the Central American countryside, and the indifference of the American government to their sad and desperate story.
Director
The film begins with the exhumation of four American women tortured, raped, and murdered by the right-wing government of El Salvador on December 2, 1980. The women — Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline; Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Maryknoll mission sisters; and Jean Donovan, a young laywoman from Cleveland — were providing food, shelter, medical care and burial to the poor. They were targeted for assassination by a death squad within the U.S.-supported Salvadoran military as part of a policy of suppressing the poor and “liberation theology.” The award-winning documentary focuses primarily on the life of Jean Donovan through archival news footage, interviews, home movies, and diary readings.
Assistant Director
Shot over six weeks in December 1971, and January 1972, the film consisted of interviews with Protestants, Catholics, politicians, and some soldiers, combined with TV news clips of bombings and violence. The deaths of four individuals formed the central focus of the film, which Ophüls described as ‘an old, middle-aged, humanistic, social-democratic attempt to give people an idea that life after all is not that cheap’. The BBC refused to transmit the completed film on the grounds that it was ‘too pro-Irish’ (Sunday Times, 5 Nov. 1972). (via http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/media/docs/freespeech.htm)
