Baltazar López
Writer and director of The Path of the Shadows (El Camino de la Sombra).
Baltazar López is a Salvadoran actor, playwright, screenwriter and director, born in 1952. He came to the theater through the Centro Nacional de Artes, founded in San Salvador in 1970, and has worked on stage and screen ever since. He is a former director of El Salvador’s National Theater.
In 1980, as the war took hold, he left El Salvador for Mexico, and a year later moved on to Nicaragua, where he took a degree in art history. He later earned a master’s in screenwriting. While the war lasted he returned home only briefly.
Filling the gaps, inventing nothing
López wrote the screenplay for The Path of the Shadows and directed it in El Salvador in January 2018, after trips to find the cast and the locations. Producer Lawrence Justin Mills, whose family he has known for many years and with whom he had made smaller projects, brought him the recorded testimony of Carlos Mauricio.
He has been firm about what the dramatized scenes are. They add characters and fill gaps, he told CounterPunch, but invent nothing. One added character, a girlfriend who fought with the guerrillas, turned out to match Mauricio’s own life. López made the film, he said, because young Salvadorans are not taught this history in school.
Stage, screen, opera
His other work includes the play El túnel, the film El límite, about gangs, and the opera El Mozote, which he produced. In 1993 he promoted the Teatro Circulante, a traveling theater project. When he gave an interview in 2022 he was living in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Sources
- CounterPunchJason Ward on the film and its makers, September 8, 2020
- Espacio“El futuro del teatro no es halagador,” an interview by Roberto Pineda, August 2022 (in Spanish)