Innocent Voices (2005)

Luis Mandoki's Innocent Voices arrives from 2004, a war drama set in El Salvador during the 1980s, and it concerns a boy named Chava who is eleven and therefore has roughly one year before the army comes to collect him. The film is based on the childhood of its screenwriter, Óscar Torres, and it proceeds with the grim patience of a countdown. Children are taken from classrooms. A priest plays a banned song over a loudspeaker to distract soldiers. The mother sews. The uncle joins the guerrillas. None of this requires annotation, and none of it receives any.

The performances are strong and the direction is fond of slow motion and a soundtrack that instructs us when to feel. Roger Ebert called it effective without being overwhelming, which is a fair verdict and a generous one. The film wants us to understand that war consumes children, and it makes that argument through specific bodies and specific rooms, not through slogans. There is a mentally handicapped man in the village, Ancha, who ends up hanged by the river. He is a casualty, not a statement. The cast is entirely Latin American because the story is Salvadoran, and nobody in the film pauses to congratulate anyone for that.

This is a humanist war drama of the old school, the kind that argues against killing children by showing children being killed. It is sincere, it is upsetting, and it is entirely innocent of the cultural preoccupations that would later come to define a certain strain of filmmaking. No lectures are delivered. No systems are indicted beyond the obvious one, which is war itself. The film was Mexico's submission for the foreign language Oscar and did not make the shortlist. That outcome tells us something about 2005, though not, I think, what anyone intended.