At the beginning of Innocent Voices, screen titles inform us that in the '80s, the El Salvadoran army was embroiled in a civil war with farmers stemming from disputes over land. Titles at the end say the U.S. spent $1 billion funding government forces and that hundreds of thousands of children around the world are used as soldiers.
What's missing is that the war against El Salvador's repressive right-wing government was against the FMLN, a Marxist coalition guilty of, among other things, executing politicos, at a time when it seemed Central America was headed in the same direction as Eastern Europe.
But the film's main thrust isn't politics but family. Chava (Padilla) is on the cusp of 12, the age when the army will round him up for mandatory conscription—something also practiced by the Communists. Either fate is something Chava's mother Kella (a distractingly beautiful Varela) wants him to avoid.
As Kella struggles to make ends meet, Chava finds after-school work and busies himself as any other 11-year-old boy would: wrestling with friends, flying kites (actually candle-lit paper balloons) and romancing a cute classmate. But the war encroaches on their lives, with late-night bullets flying through their home and guerillas launching attacks from schools and churches.
At a full two hours, director and co-writer Mandoki takes his time telling the tale of the film's other writer, Oscar Torres. But such languid filmmaking doesn't serve the purposes of drama and more than once it's easy to forget there's a war going on. Subplots such as Chava's job belong in other films, as do cliched characters such as his retarded adult friend who only exists so we later can see him lynched.
Despite a deus ex machina ending that defangs the film's potential strength, Mandoki does an admirable job of capturing a piece of Salvadoran history and reminding us that children are sometimes more than war's helpless victims.