When Canadian designer Bruce Mau was invited to Guatemala to help reimagine the country’s future, they introduced him as Bruce, who was “going to redesign Guatemala”. Although this was a bit of a stretch, the scale at which he helped change the nation’s outlook was similarly huge. Guatemala was originally called Guate by the Indigenous people, but the Spanish later added mala, meaning bad. Mau’s first move was to add an “a”, creating “Guate! Amala!,” or “The love of Guate.” The slogan was part of a larger campaign to shine a positive light on the country, showcase the people working to improve their country, and recruit a thousand volunteers to help spread these messages. They received 20,000 sign ups in the first weekend.
This large-scale, systemic thinking and the man behind it is the focus of Mau, a feature-length documentary directed by Austrian documentarians Benji and Jono Bergmann that traces Mau’s life and career, drawing connections between his unique ability to speculate on possible futures and his own upbringing in the rural Canadian mining town of Sudbury. “My first design project was designing my own life,” Mau earnestly explains in the film. “Understanding that I would not accept what it was and I would have to create a new one.” Before leaving for Toronto for college, Mau had never left Sudbury, a nickel mining town whose landscape was so violently altered by the industry that Nasa used the black, chemical-poisoned terrain to train astronauts for moon missions. Mau’s upbringing was nothing short of abject: his father was a miner and a violent, alcoholic “maniac”.
