Lawrence Justin Mills

Producer and editor of The Path of the Shadows (El Camino de la Sombra).

Oscar Suncín and Lawrence Justin Mills stand on either side of the Spanish-language banner for the film.
Lawrence Justin Mills stands in front of the painted Guazapa Café mural, beside a banner for El Camino de la Sombra.
Producer Lawrence Justin Mills at Guazapa Café in Suchitoto on the premiere weekend, November 2018.

Lawrence Justin Mills began The Path of the Shadows with an interview. In Washington, D.C., he filmed Carlos Mauricio telling the story of his abduction and torture in El Salvador.

Mills, who is based in Maryland, took the recording to Baltazar López, a longtime family friend with whom he had made smaller projects. López wrote the screenplay and directed the cast in El Salvador. Mills produced the film and edited it.

His mother’s country

Mills’s mother is Salvadoran. He visits the country regularly and has stayed close to it since childhood. He heard about the civil war from his own family and from others who had witnessed it, and a visit to the Museum of the Revolution in Perquín, in the mountains of Morazán, sharpened that interest. He studied history at the University of Baltimore. Around 2016 he began filming the testimonies of survivors and veterans, with a series of docudramas in mind. The Path of the Shadows is the first.

“I have found that relating history through testimonials combined with dramatization by actors is very effective.”

Lawrence Justin Mills, 2019

He felt the war was little known, above all among the young. Ahead of the Suchitoto premiere he told Gaceta Suchitoto that he wanted young Salvadorans to learn about the war from the people who had lived through it.

The interview came first

Mills filmed Mauricio’s testimony before a single scene was staged. The dramatized scenes were shot in El Salvador in January 2018. Then he edited the film himself, braiding the interview with the performances and with archival footage of the war into fifty-eight minutes.

The structure had an unlikely model, he told CounterPunch: the National Geographic series Locked Up Abroad, which cuts between a survivor’s account and its re-enactment.

The film opened in Suchitoto, El Salvador, in November 2018 and went on to festivals and screenings in eight countries. Its lead actor, Oscar Suncín, was named Best Actor at the Diamond Film Awards in January 2019.

A camera operator films three actors from an arm’s length away while a boom microphone hangs over them; a valley and a town lie far below.
Director of photography Michael Potter films the scene at La Puerta del Diablo in which Mauricio’s captors threaten to throw him from the cliff. January 2018.

Other witnesses

Testimony runs through the rest of his work. Mills has also recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors, among them Irene Weiss and Eugene Bergman. His own site, lawrencejustinmills.com, covers that work and his other films.

Elsewhere

Sources

  • CounterPunchJason Ward on the film and its makers, September 8, 2020
  • Gaceta SuchitotoOn the premiere in Suchitoto, November 10, 2018 (in Spanish)
  • MediumYash Singhania on the film and its producer, February 16, 2019