Jorge Asturias

Five friends go out for the best night of their lives and their last together. To hunt for love, cheap drinks and salvation.

In Guatemala, violence is contagious. The neighbors of Villas de La Esperanza, in fear of an eventual invasion of those infected by violence, arm themselves and patrol nights, risking their lives for the safety of their families. But battling violence with violence only spreads the contagion, and the neighbors will realise that the greatest danger is not what lurks outside their secure gated community. The real danger lies within. In Guatemala violence is contagious, and we are all infected.

Una mujer es brutalmente agredida por miembros de la "mara". Como de costumbre, las autoridades no tienen un sospechoso y Tono, el mejor amigo del hermano de la victima, decide secuestrar a un miembro de una "mara" al azar de las calles y lo lleva junto a Jacobo, el hermano de la victima, a una bodega abandonada, donde lo torturan y golpean. Pero las consecuencias de sus actos pronto se convertirán en evidentes y tendrán que tomar una decisión que afectará a sus vidas para siempre.

LENCHO, a 30-year-old artist and graffiti writer, is back in Guatemala after living a decade in New York. Eager to bring artistic expression to his home country silenced by over 30 years of terror, Lencho assembles a collective of artists to produce public art projects of social impact. As its first activity, the group organizes an art festival in Rabinal, a small, indigenous village in the Guatemalan highlands. The group's work comes of interest to the director of a secret "social cleansing" program of the national police designed to quash dissension and organizing among the youth. As Lencho labors to coordinate the music, poetry and muralism components of the festival, he finds himself increasingly haunted by memories of the death of his father, a journalist during the civil war. "El Regreso de Lencho" portrays one man's journey to self-knowledge and action: can Guatemala do the same?