The film’s action takes place entirely within this circumscribed world, and Mandoki gives us a dense and vivid depiction of life in a conflict zone. Innocent Voices follows a year in the life of a waist-high protagonist named Chava (the extraordinary Carlos Padilla), based on Torres, as he and his community confront the ever-present threat of forced conscription-the Salvadoran Army’s policy being to press boys as young as 12 into service against the leftist guerrillas-and the steadily encroaching violence of the war.Ĭhava inhabits a world peopled mostly by schoolmates and female relatives, nearly all the surviving able-bodied men of Cuscatanzingo having departed either for military camps or the United States. Unlike the Hollywood movies that portrayed these events as they were unfolding-movies such as Oliver Stone’s classic Salvador, which, Graham Greene-style, had jaded gringo journalists working out internal dramas amidst Third World bloodshed- Innocent Voices depicts the Salvadoran War from the point of view of the civilians who endured its greatest suffering. The setting is the small village of Cuscatanzingo, where Torres, then 11 years old, lived with his mother and siblings. REVIEW Innocent Voices A new film depicts the Salvadoran War as lived by those who suffered most - ordinary civiliansīased on the life-story of Oscar Torres, who co-wrote the script with the Mexican-born Mandoki (heretofore best known in this country for Lifetimey weepers like Message in a Bottle and Angel Eyes), it takes place in 1980, at the outbreak of the Salvadoran civil war. As he hustles to find work to help his single mother pay the bills, and experiences the pangs of first love for a beautiful classmate, Chava's tiny home village becomes both playground and battlefield.Īrmed only with the love of his mother (Leonor Varela) and a small radio that broadcasts a forbidden anthem of love and peace, and faced with the impossible choice of joining either the army or the rebels, Chava finds the courage to keep his heart open, and his spirit alive, in his race against time. Chava's life becomes a game of survival, not only from the bullets of the escalating war, but also from the dispiriting effects of daily violence. If he is lucky, Chava has just one year of innocence left, one year before he, too, will be conscripted to fight the government's battle against the peasant rebels of the FMLN. In El Salvador in the 1980s, the government's armed forces are already recruiting twelve year olds, rousting them out of their classes at the local middle school. More than 300,000 children presently serve in armies in over 40 countries.īased on the true story of screenwriter Oscar Torres's embattled childhood, Luis Mandoki's Innocent Voices is the poignant tale of Chava (Carlos Padilla), an eleven-year-old boy who suddenly becomes the "man of the house" after his father abandons the family in the middle of a civil war.
This was the official website for the 2005 movie, Innocent VoicesĬontent is from the site's 2005 archived pages as well as other outside sources.
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