The film begins with the exhumation of four American women tortured, raped, and murdered by the right-wing government of El Salvador on December 2, 1980. The women -- Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline; Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Maryknoll mission sisters; and Jean Donovan, a young laywoman from Cleveland -- were providing food, shelter, medical care and burial to the poor. They were targeted for assassination by a death squad within the U.S.-supported Salvadoran military as part of a policy of suppressing the poor and "liberation theology." The award-winning documentary focuses primarily on the life of Jean Donovan through archival news footage, interviews, home movies, and diary readings. Neither dry nor doctrinaire, "Roses in December" is a painful, absorbing look at the consequences of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy and U.S. intervention in Central America, and how that policy instigated -- and then tried to whitewash -- the brutal deaths of the four American charity workers.
Roses in December
Detailing the rape, torture and murder of four American missionaries in El Salvador by members of the El Salvador National Guard, as well as the subsequent attempts by the government to cover up the story.
