- Title: Lessons for a War
- Duration: 97
- Screening format: DCP
- Language: Ixil, Quiché
- Subtitles: Spanish, English, French
- Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
- Sound: 5.1
- Year: 2012
- Production country: Mexico
- Production companies: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, Fondo para la Producción Cinematográfica de Calidad, Fragua Cinematografía
"Lessons for a War proposes the daily elaboration of pain and sorrow in light of memory as a potencial. Its characters do not abandon themselves to the past, rather they mold it as a source of communal knowledge that gradually spreads and gains new territory against displacement. Juan Manuel Sepúlveda acquires a political commitment through understanding that his exercise as a documentarian accompanies a process that does not end in defeat or victory." - Lucía D. Miranda, Reflexiones sobre cine mexicano contemporáneo.
Between 1982 and 1996, the Ixil and Quiché people took refuge in the mountains as a last resort to save themselves from the massacres carried out by the Guatemalan Army, which took the lives of more than 200,000 indigenous people. After those fourteen years, the communities ended up settling in the northeastern part of the range, an area currently under siege due to the wealth of natural resources to be found there.
Lessons for a war is a celebration of the resistance of people preparing to defend themselves against another coming war. A chant of hope of a community that will not give up.
