I rented and watched a powerful movie about children growing up during El Salvador’s dirty civil war of the 1980s.
The film is a dramatization, not a documentary, written by Oscar Orlando Torres, a Salvadorean writer who spent his pre-adolescence in that bloody war. It was made in Mexico, with Mexican actors, including Carlos Padilla as Chava (the protagonist) and Leonor Varela as his mother. The Director was Mexican Director Luis Mandaki. After its 2005 release in Mexico, it won several awards at film festivals, including the Berlin Film Festival and the Seattle Film Festival.
The film depicts Chava’s impoverished family living in a cardboard and sheet-metal shack in a slum that unfortunately for them is a battle-ground between the Salvadorean Army and the FMLN rebels. Their attempts to live semi-normal lives are constantly interrupted at unpredictable times by bullets and explosions ripping through their home. Chavas mother is trying to work her way out of poverty, but spends most of her time trying to protect her kids. It is a hellish life. To make matters worse, Chava and several of his friends are approaching 12 years of age, which is when the Army forcibly “recruits” boys to turn them into child soldiers (to prevent them from becoming rebels).
Since the movie mostly shows events from the boy’s point of view, geopolitical aspects of the Salvadorean civil war are mentioned only briefly or not at all. The film briefly slaps the US for sending military advisors “to train our soldiers to kill us”. However, it leaves unmentioned the role of large agricultural corporations (eg., United Fruit) in enlisting the US’s help in keeping El Salvador a feudal society so 14 Salvadorean families can control most everything in the country and we North Americans can enjoy cheap bananas and mangos. That isn’t a failing of the film — it simply leaves all that for another film to tackle.
What the film does well is make viewers see innocent people living a truly hellish life — a totally human-caused one. I hope it makes people angry and motivates them to work against the forces that create such hells on earth.
Highly recommended.
Also recommended is the short “Making of the Film” video that is one of the bonus features on the DVD. It has two benefits: a) it is refreshing after the suspenseful film to be reminded that the film is a dramatization by actors, and b) it gives a glimpse of how child actors (even one only five years old) were able to give such convincing performances.
Links to further information about the film:
- Official “Voces Inocentes” (Spanish) website
- IMDB entry about the movie
- Wikipedia entry about the movie
- Movie trailer at YouTube
- Review by National Geographic
November 6, 2009 at 8:07 am |
Are you kidding me? the director, producer or whoever made this didn´t do his homework at all! I didn´t expect a balanced film when i watched this, but I also didn´t expect something so inaccurate. Guerrillas, army, they both used children during the war, a lot more others were abandoned during raids to the villages or left at the steps of churches or houses when they were born in hideouts in the mountains where the guerrilla met. The protagonist was clearly just looking for easy shock effect.
Yeah, but why would I bother with this after reading this gracious quote?:
“The film briefly slaps the US for sending military advisors “to train our soldiers to kill us”.”