Lansdowne Productions

On 22 December 1997, forty-five indigenous residents of the small Southern Mexican village of Acteal were attending a prayer meeting in their village church when they were slaughtered by unknown paramilitary forces. They were members of the pacifist group Las Abejas (The Bees), who were supporters of the revolutionary Zapatistas but renounced their violent methods. The investigation into their deaths quickly went suspiciously cold. Scottish documentary maker Nick Higgins, an expert on Mexican culture and politics and the author of Understanding the Chiapas Rebellion, attains unprecedented access to the place, the people, and the story behind a barely-reported atrocity.

It is estimated that 40% of the world’s population lack the opportunity to be educated in their own language. In Colours of the Alphabet we get an insight into the challenges this poses as we follow a group of first graders in Zambia – a country with 72 local languages where education is primarily offered in English.