Venezuelan American teen's film on Guatemalan genocide grows out of Catholic high school program

MIAMI (OSV News) -- A filmmaker and graduate of Miami Catholic schools with a new documentary film about Guatemalan-Mayan immigration to the U.S. said her project brought clarity to her own immigrant history as a Venezuelan American.

"For my family and many others, coming to the U.S. wasn't a choice we made lightly. We fled a country in crisis -- a place where insecurity, political instability, and economic collapse made it impossible to live safely," said Victoria Alonso Noujaim, a 2021 graduate of Immaculata-La Salle High School in Miami and writer-director of an award-winning short film, "The Miami Kids and the Maya."

The film premiered Oct. 19 at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach -- close to the Guatemalan Mayan community that first formed here some 30 years ago and found employment mostly in Florida's agricultural industry. The 45-minute documentary is primarily in English with English subtitles.

In the film, Alonso Noujaim tells the story of her journey of discovery as a high school student of the families and survivors of 1980s Guatemala genocide against Indigenous people and their linguistic, economic and legal struggles in the United States.

Through her high school's community service and teen leadership program, Alonso Noujaim said she had first come in contact with Guatemalans through a volunteer project in Palm Beach County and the Guatemalan-Maya Center, a decades-old community hub and nonprofit advocacy center for displaced Guatemalans in the city of Lake Worth.

The documentary has already garnered critical acclaim, receiving several prestigious awards and recognitions for its impactful storytelling and visual artistry.

Currently a junior at Georgia's Savannah College of Art and Design, best known as SCAD, Alonso Noujaim is majoring in film, cinema and video studies.

She said her parents are filmmakers themselves and that she grew up helping them on projects even as they began establishing themselves in Miami after leaving behind the turbulent transition to a socialist dictatorship in their native Venezuela.

After attending Catholic schools in Caracas, the teenage Alonso Noujaim said her father moved the family to the U.S. where she spent a disorienting year or so in Florida public schools before her parents enrolled her at Immaculata-La Salle High, a Miami archdiocesan coed school.

There she enlisted in the school's volunteerism club called SALTT, which stands for Service and Leadership for Today and Tomorrow. For the first time, she felt an awakening of her Catholic faith through heart-wrenching encounters with other migrant communities and the impoverished circumstances in which they often lived.

"I learned service isn't just about doing community hours -- it was about actually living our values and helping our neighbors; I realized that this was the faith I connected with," Alonso Noujaim told the Florida Catholic, Miami's archdiocesan news outlet.

She recalled sitting in the dilapidated home of a Guatemalan family near West Palm Beach and thinking about the similarities but also stark differences in her own immigration experience.

"I remember one time I was sitting in one of the homes of families -- and most of the trailers were barely holding together -- seeing how they fled their country, losing loved ones, and thinking I was going to help them," she said. "I realized they helped me in a way, by opening this experience for me as not just another (school) requirement."

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, involved the mass killing of the Maya indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War by successive Guatemalan military governments. The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly Indigenous northern provinces, according to U.N. reports, with an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans killed during the war and at least 40,000 persons "disappeared."

"I think so many of us as immigrants faced similar struggles and trying to build a new life in a new country. Meeting that community really opened my eyes because you see people taking different paths, not flying here as I did, but taking a dangerous route," said Alonso Noujaim.

In 2014, representatives of the school's SALTT club traveled to Washington to be honored at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for their works of "charity in action."

"We are immensely proud of Victoria and the legacy of service-learning at ILS. Our students and teachers continue to make a difference, particularly with migrant children," said Sister Kim Keraitis, principal of Immaculata-La Salle High School.

Alonso Noujaim credits her father for allowing her to spend time with him on filmmaking sets and projects, which included music video production and other films in the Spanish-speaking market internationally.

With the recent controversial elections in Venezuela and harsh election-year rhetoric in the U.S. surrounding illegal immigration and reports of immigrant-driven crime, Alonso Noujaim said she would love to one day make a film about her beloved Venezuela. But she realizes it will not be without controversy back home.

And seeing so much negative media portrayals of Venezuelans in the U.S. has been difficult, she added.

"It's definitely a sensitive topic but an important one to address, especially given all the coverage lately. The reality is that Venezuelans, like any immigrant community, are diverse," Alonso Noujaim said. "We come from different walks of life, with different stories, challenges and reasons for being here."