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.

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. More than half of the population of Guatemala are descended from the original Mayans.

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The film tells the story of the Mayan people – who built a civilisation in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras – in the Yukatek Maya language. 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.

Cajas said the level of bloodshed is historically inaccurate and makes the Mayans seem savage. “It’s a case of Western civilization imposing its view about other civilizations,” he said.

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“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. 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… and thus deserved rescue”.

This is not Apocalypto’s first brush with controversy: Gibson was recently accused by a Mexican director of ripping off his ideas. Juan Catlett has launched a lawsuit claiming that Gibson used scenes from his 1991 film, Return to Aztlan, in Apocalypto. Elsewhere, in today’s Guardian comment pages, Giles Fraser criticises the film for repeating the alleged anti-semitism of The Passion of the Christ (see the link at the bottom of this page).

None of the controversy appears likely to derail Apocalypto’s success, however. The film has broken box office records for foreign language films in its opening weekends in several countries, including Britain. It has also earned a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign-language film.

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