Lt. Oscar Ramírez with Oscar after his abduction in Guatemala. Photographer unknown. Photo courtesy of Oscar Ramírez and FilmRise.

This story about a brutal episode in the Guatemalan Civil War begins with a snowy landscape in what looks like suburban America. How did such a bloody trail end up here? Director Ryan Suffern traces a long journey from Central America to an inextricably involved United States in a 100-minute procedural that quickly becomes harrowing.

The Oscar of the title is a young boy who may have survived a 1982 incident in which the Guatemalan Army murdered nearly the entire population of the village of Dos Erres. The film follows a quest undertaken by numerous organizations seeking justice. The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation investigates suspected burial sites to recover and identify the remains of thousands of people who “disappeared” during the nation’s 30-year Civil war. These scientists work together with FAMDEGUA, a human rights organization whose acronym stands for The Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained in Guatemala.

To fend off the threat of Communism, the Reagan administration supported Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt, who took over in a 1982 coup and established a scorched earth policy to eliminate opponents, which happened to include the men, women, and children of some 600 Mayan villages.

The film is disturbing enough as it observes the exhumation of mass graves, where the skeletal human remains are so numerous that they are temporarily kept in garbage bags. Yet when two soldiers involved in the massacre come forward, the film becomes nearly unbearable as the soldiers, as well as a few survivors, recount what happened that day. Existing structures in Dos Erres are filmed in time-lapse so that clouds ominously pass through the sky, which makes your heart beat faster as tale after tale of cruelty is described.

The soldiers who came forward are not the charismatic mass-murderers of The Act of Killing, but like that film these men must face their past. Finding Oscar has a relatively happy, even joyful ending, but it is a hard road indeed to that catharsis.

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Finding Oscar
Directed by Ryan Suffern
Written by Mark Monroe and Ryan Suffern
Not rated: contains disturbing images of mass murder.
100 minutes
Opens today at Landmark West End Cinema

Finding Oscar – Trailer from The Kennedy/Marshall Company on Vimeo.