Maria's Story, Luna Productions

Maria’s Story

A documentary portrait of love and survival in El Salvador’s Civil War.

“Documentary at its most illuminating and succinct”
–Los Angeles Times

“As the camera jiggles and the bullets fly one comes as close to combat as one will ever get in the movie theater.”
–San Francisco Examiner

“An emotionally powerful film which communicates from the heart.”
–San Francisco Bay Times

Produced by Catherine Ryan and Pamela Cohen, Camino Film Projects.
Short listed for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Multiple “Best Documentary”film festival awards.
Broadcast on POV, the prestigious non-fiction PBS series.

The film was policially ground-breaking,
cited by many as a key contributing factor to ending the US funding of the civil war in El Salvador.
The film was technologically ground-breaking,
the first documentary ever to go from a consumer video format all the way to 16mm film for theatrical release.

Click here for link to official Maria’s Story website.

Click for full Text

“… a genuinely heartening and searing account”

-Regina Hackett. Art Critic. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 11,1991

Click icon to read all

“…straightforward … captures the most human elements of civil war without sentimentalizing the fighters or trivializing their daily struggle to survive …… the film ends by reaffirming the power of art to express love in the most tryannical of settings.”

-Steven Mikulan, LA Weekly

Click For Full Text

“What emerges is a portrait of an engaging, strong woman.”

-Kathy Huffhines, Free Press Movie Critic, Detroit Free Press, April 10, 1991

Click icon to read all

“Maria’s Story and its role in the technological history of documentary filmmaking” article in Kino-Eye.com (click to read)

About Maria’s Story and the Kino-Eye article: We are so proud of what we accomplished with this documentary in terms of helping to end the civil war in El Salvador. But as documentary film makers we are also proud of our paradigm-shattering use of new technologies to make it. After having failed with a 16mm shoot due to the challenging logistics of filming during a war in the guerilla controlled zones of control in war-torn El Salvador, we returned with a Video8 camera, the smallest workable consumer video camcorder. It is hard to realise it today, but in fact no documentary had ever been made this way before. Maria’s Story was the first documentary ever to go from a small-format video acquisition all the way to film, which back then was the best and only viable format for theatrical distribution and exhibition.

Then, to go beyond to be short-listed for an Academy Award, well, not bad for the little format that could.

BTW – our solar charger was also ground-breaking for video technology. Travelling lite by foot and by donkey in the mountains of El Salvador, we had to jury-rig our own as there was certainly nothing commercially available at the time.

Of course, I write ”we,” but the real hero of all this was John Knoop, our extremely talented, visionary, courageous cinematographer. Or rather … videographer. Thanks John! Well done!