Juan Catlett has launched a lawsuit claiming that Gibson used scenes from his 1991 film, Return to Aztlan, in Apocalypto. This is not Apocalypto's first brush with controversy: Gibson was recently accused by a Mexican director of ripping off his ideas. Cajas's criticism follows the comments of Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture, who slammed Gibson's film for purveying "an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another. "It shows the Mayans as a barbarous, murderous people that can only be saved by the arrival of the Spanish," Cajas told the Associated Press. "It's a case of Western civilization imposing its view about other civilizations," he said.
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Gibson has said he wants to make the Mayan language "cool" again and encourage young people "to speak it with pride." However, the movie also depicts Mayans as being extremely violent and carrying out beheadings and human sacrifices.Ĭajas said the level of bloodshed is historically inaccurate and makes the Mayans seem savage. The film tells the story of the Mayan people - who built a civilisation in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - in the Yukatek Maya language. More than half of the population of Guatemala are descended from the original Mayans. Ricardo Cajas, Guatemala's presidential commissioner on racism, said yesterday the film had set back understanding of the Mayan people by 50 years and compared its impact to that of the negative images of Native Americans in US movies from the 1950s. Mel Gibson's road to rehabilitation after his anti-semitic outburst last summer appears to have hit a pothole: his Mayan epic Apocalypto has been condemned by a Guatemalan official for painting Mayan people in a derogatory light.