The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez
April 3rd, 2007 by Zsofia
One of the notable documentary films currently travelling through the festival circuit is “The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez”, a German-made film honouring the life of the first US soldier to be killed in the Iraq war.
Gutierrez was one of the 300,000 soldiers sent by the US Army to war in Iraq. His death within the first few hours of the war prompted his picture to travel all over the world. He was a so-called green-card soldier – one of approximately 32,000 soldiers in the US Army, who have traded military service for US citizenship.
Directed by Heidi Specogna, the film tells the moving and nearly unbelievable story of a one-time street child from Guatemala, who headed north along the Pan-American highway full of hopes and desires for a better future – and ultimately to die an American hero far from home. Searching for the images and stories that made up this life, the director set out to retrace Gutierrez’s path from Guatemala through Mexico and into the USA.
Gutierrez apparently dreamed of becoming an architect, enlisting in the Marines to support his education. Orphaned during Guatemala’s lengthy civil war (waged by army juntas with U.S. support), he was the survivor of a sad and lonely childhood, passing through foster families and briefly reuniting with a long-lost sister before jumping the Mexico-USborder and living homeless in Los Angeles until a social worker helped turn his life around.
The Swiss-born filmmaker honours Gutierrez’s life not simply by tracing its hard-scrabble path, but by expanding its scope to represent all green-card warriors and their essential threads in America’s fabric. The film is narrated by people who knew José Antonio: his friends from the street, the social workers at the orphanage, his sister, his foster family, his comrades at Camp Pendleton in the United States Marines.
The film has been described as an “impeccably cinematic portrait and an unforgettable tale of hope and tenacity, dashed against the blunt reality of war in Iraq.”
For more info on this film, see First Hand Films.
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