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120 MINUTES | SPANISH Luis Mandoki has directed some forgettable Hollywood pap, including Message in a Bottle and When a Man Loves a Woman, but with this return to Spanish-language film — his first in about 20 years — he achieves a much greater sense of gravitas. Through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy, and based on the experience of screenwriter Oscar Torres, Voces inocentes/Innocent Voices looks at the civil war that raged in El Salvador for 12 years in the 1970s and ’80s. The fatherless Chava (an exceptional Carlos Padilla) lives in a tiny village caught in the crosshairs of the guerrilla rebels and the government army. His kid-life — wrestling with pals in the street, passing notes with his pretty crush in class, climbing mango trees — is juxtaposed with war-life — scrambling away from soldiers, dodging bullets, watching his friends get drafted and killed. And it’s the civilians’ minor rebellions — throwing rocks at soldiers, listening to banned protest songs — that prove most powerful.
BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
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