So That it Doesn’t Happen Again

Koman Ilel is an altnerative community collective, focused on communication and popular media. By working together, each member of the collective can contribute their own abilities and insights into the production of media from a collective perspective.

“So That it Doesn’t Happen Again” is a documentary project that is focused on the War of Attrition, faced by the Zapatista as well as other indigenous communities between 1996 and 2000 in Chiapas, Mexico.

The objective of this documentary is to create a collection of testimonials from women and men that will collectively capture the happenings of the war. While collecting testimonials of men and women who lived through this war, they seek to provide a reflection on: war, peace, justice, reparations, victims, among other themes. The title of the documentary derives from previous work completed by the collective, where an interviewee shared the following reflection on peace: “Peace. Peace in Tsotsil [an indigenous mayan language] has to do with the heart. It’s called jun o’ontonal, which means, the heart is not broken.