With only one company’s demand for natural chewing gum keeping Guatemala's San Benito chicle cooperative in business, a sustainable source of local work teeters on the brink of oblivion.
LAST OF THE GUM MEN documents one season in the lives of five of the last chicleros working in the Maya Biosphere Reserve.
Distributed by the National Education Telecommunications Association and broadcast by PBS affiliates across the USA.
Produced and co-directed by Laura Pacheco, who went on to produce the wonderful EAST OF SALINAS.
At this point in my life, I’d taken a UW extension ‘documentary film production’ course and had made a short film for a local non-profit. I was working as an un-paid assistant at a PBS station, logging tapes and writing grants. Then Laura walked in with a bit of Getty money to make a film about chicleros….
LGM was the first semi-major, non-fiction project I ever helped make in a substantial way. In hindsight, I can see that I still employ the method I was drawn to use here: Go, be slow, but get to the story’s center. Observe. Visit. Problem solve. Record what’s needed to make a film that will take viewers to places they would otherwise never go.
This project provided a reason to learn big tree climbing. It also proved that solar panels are useless for recharging batteries in a shady forest. And we should’ve noticed—and recorded—more SOUND (and found a better narrator). But all’s well that ends well. Hopefully one or two people who saw this film were inspired to study solutions to the complex problems that fill its subtext.
The Peten region of Guatemala is magical. I will never forget sitting high in a treetop, watching a group of toucans fly past at sunset, or hearing a jaguar ‘saw’ somewhere nearby, in the deep darkness of a jungle night. As to the many men and women of San Benito and Melchor de Mancos who let us into their lives… they were equally extraordinary—always generous, endlessly tolerant and courageously real.
My hat is off to everyone involved in this project. Thank you.