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Voces inocentes. Dir. Luis Mandoki. Mexico, 2004. Dur.: 110 min.
Voces inocentes is an inspirational coming-of-age story about a Salvadoran boy, Chava (played superbly by newcomer Carlos Padilla), whose childhood coincides with the harrowing years of the Salvadoran government's civil war with leftist guerrillas (1980-1992). The war started when peasants under the banner of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) organized militarized opposition to the dispossession of their land, confiscation which was regularly practiced by the right-wing government. This historically specific and solemn background to Chava' s childhood suggests that the film intertwines two different themes at once, meaning a sentimental and somewhat idyllic look on childhood as well as the stomach-churning violence of war. This is exactly what the director Luis Mandoki combines in his story. The strategy of exploring war from a child's perspective might not be very original (see V. Schlöondorff's' The Tin Drum (1978), P. Chukhraj's The Thief (1998) or G. Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006), to mention few) but its Central American setting during the Reagan era remains largely unexplored in Latin American film.
The story is based on an autobiographical screenplay by Oscar Torres, who fled El Salvador in 1984 at the age of twelve, to find a new home in Los Angeles. Similarly, Chava escapes the war at the end of the movie, allowing the viewer to sigh with relief. The opening scene described below, however, together with a slowly built up tension that permeates the entire movie to finally culminate in the general mayhem of war, keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout the film. The stakes are raised particularly because it is civilians and oftentimes children who are the principal victims of war's endemic violence. Such a gut- wrenching effect is due to the fact that Chava's makeshift cardboard village happens to lie right in the crossfire of the conflict, where government soldiers and leftists rebel forces collide, gradually turning blissful village into a war zone.
The movie begins with a dramatic scene in slow motion, where distressed little Chava and his equally terrified young friends march in pouring rain with their hands above their heads, escorted by armed soldiers twice the boys' size to the site of their imminent execution. This long...