Boys no older than 12 trudge through the mud and rain, hands clasped behind their heads, a gun pointed at their backs. They are tired and hungry, and they are marching to their execution. The beginning scenes of Innocent Voices are somber and shocking, much like the rest of the film, which follows one boy’s struggle to survive a civil war raging in his backyard.
“The movie is an homage to children,” said director Luis Mandoki, who, in a sit down interview, recently discussed Innocent Voices, along with screenwriter Oscar Torres.
Mandoki explained that 300,000 children around the world are drafted into armies in war-torn countries, and hopes Innocent Voices will start a dialogue about this ugly truth.
Torres was one of those children in El Salvador in the 1980s, though, thanks to his mother’s sacrifices, he was lucky enough to escape the grasp of the El Salvadoran army. Other boys weren’t so lucky, and Torres sees Innocent Voices, the auto-biographical dramatization of his childhood, as a way of making amends and working through his own trauma.
Like Hotel Rwanda before it, Innocent Voices is a daring portrait of civil war that touches on issues and a conflict previously ignored by Hollywood. Perhaps it is the United States government’s tangled relationship with the war in El Salvador (they gave millions in aid and were responsible for training the El Salvadoran army), or that the right story hadn’t come along yet.
Now, at a time when the U.S. is once again involved in conflicts abroad that affect children, Innocent Voices is a timely and effective exploration of the innocents that get caught up in war.
“You carry the violence inside you forever, but the three months we worked on the script was therapy. He’s my psychiatrist,” Torres said, pointing to Mandoki.
Torres’ emotional earnestness shines through in the screenplay, the film’s principle strength. Whereas other political dramas, including this summer’s The Constant Gardener, use fictional characters and plots to illustrate real-life parallels, Innocent Voices is 100 percent true. It’s a documentary wrapped up in an engaging narrative plot; watch it and you may just learn something.
Innocent Voices manages to be emotionally unsettling – particularly in the scene in which two young boys are shot, execution style – without being heavy-handed, a problem that runs rampant in the political drama genre. It achieves this, in part, through moments of humor that seem natural in a story where children are central. After all, boys have a wicked sense of humor, war or no war.
While Mandoki’s direction is seamless and engaging, without the strong performances by the child cast, especially Carlos Padilla as the Torres character Chava, and from Leonor Varela, who plays Chava’s protective mother, the film would lose it’s emotional weight. The fact that none of the children are child-actors lends the film a gritty sense of reality, and, likewise, Varela withholds any melodrama, giving her character a quiet, realistic strength.
The unsettling images and themes, however, may be the one point that keeps Innocent Voices from the very audience Mandoki and Torres would like to reach most: children. The Motion Picture Association of America has rated Innocent Voices ‘R,’ for “disturbing violence and some language,” which enrages both Torres and Mandoki.
“This country doesn’t care about its children because they won’t show these images,” Torres said.
Mandoki agreed, “The discussion [of war] never touches on the most important thing: children. This movie should be watched by children.”
Both say they’ve seen something change in the children who have seen the film, that they have reached a new level of consciousness. But American parents may not wish to spoil their children’s innocence with the frank images.
Whether American children see the film or not, it will have an impact on those who do take the time to experience Torres’ harrowing tale. It is a lesson in war and politics you won’t get from a glossy Hollywood picture, and while it is difficult to watch at times (while it is not overly violent, the moments of absolute destitution are effective), Innocent Voices is a wake up call for the all too complacent among us.
Even Torres comes away feeling the effects. “I stay for every screening. After 50 times, Luis asked me ‘when will you stop seeing it?’ and I said ‘when I stop crying over it.’ It’s an awakening every time.” m
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
