The signing of a peace accord on December 29, 1996, the terms of which are supposed to be firm and lasting, formally brought to a close thirty-six years of civil war in Guatemala. Armed combat between guerrilla insurgents and government security forces began in the 1960s, lulled somewhat as the hard-hit rebels regrouped in the 1970s, and reached intense levels in the 1980s. By any standards -- quite a thing to assert in our age -- numerical indicators are chilling: some 150,000 killed, 35,000 to 40,000 disappeared (the highest number in all Latin America), 75,000 widowed, 125,000 orphaned, and a million or so people (one in eight of the population when the conflict was at its peak) displaced internally. In meaningful human terms, however, coming to grips with civil war in Guatemala lies beyond the reach of statistics, as does a lucid understanding of the vicious social and economic inequalities that triggered unrest in the first place and that still stalk the lives, and deaths, of most Guatemalans, especially the country's five to six million Maya Indians. Two documentaries by the award-winning Canadian filmmaker Mary Ellen Davis, The Devil's Dream (1992) and Tierra Madre (1996), allow us not only to contemplate Guatemala's tragic recent past but also to look forward and try to imagine how the country might ever be anything other than its tortured, unresolved self. Davis is a staunch believer in narrative and so both The Devil's Dream and Tierra Madre inform the viewer by the trust she places in having the protagonists of her films tell stories. Off-screen voice overs are seldom resorted to, restricted mostly to the questions we hear Davis herself ask quietly while on location. We are made to feel, at all times, part of a conversation between equals, not the dependent voyeurs of one side of a talking head interview. As with the ethnographic film work of David and Judith MacDougall -- see Nichols (1983; 1991) and Barbash and Taylor (1996) for comparative elaboration -- one watches The Devil's Dream and Tierra Madre without die sense of intrusion that often pervades other less skilfully constructed documentary efforts. Like the MacDougalls, Davis takes care not to rush her subjects but instead lets them present us with information in a layered, cumulative fashion, demanding that the viewer, like her and her crew in the field, be patient, alert, and discerning, above all else disposed to mull things over before reaching a conclusion. The viewer, in short, is challenged to think, not remain passive and inert as words, sounds, and images are articulated and screened. The Devil's Dream is the more artfully structured of the two films, operating on two very different but powerfully connected narrative levels. At one level, Davis utilizes footage of the Dance of the Twenty-Four Devils, a popular drama enacted on the streets of the short-lived colonial capital of Ciudad Vieja, to create a vast, symbolic allegory: having declared war on humanity, the Devils form a pact with Death and seek to capture human souls with the avowed goal of bringing to an end the human species. As the Dance of Death unfolds -- jangly folkloric music accompanies campy theatrical performances -- the iniquities of everyday life in Guatemala are interspersed in a series of grounded, self-contained vignettes: the assassination of Jose Maria Ixcaya, once an active member of an Indian rights association; the migration of entire Indian families from their homes in the mountains down to lowland plantations, where they work in the scorching heat for starvation wages; the concern of Indian mothers that die children they bring into the world, destined to be inadequately fed and thus prone to constant sickness, will not survive infancy; and the massacre of Indian residents in Santiago Atitlan by government soldiers who were stationed there. Almost everywhere Davis looks, she observes a military presence: parading from the presidential balcony, grim-faced and sun-glassed, dressed in camouflage or cloaked in medals; overseeing with macho pride the Miss Guatemala beauty pageant; patrolling a fairground, guns at the ready, during a village fiesta; and blocking roads so that a demonstration planned by striking workers will at least be disrupted, if not abandoned altogether. …