The Colors of the Mountain [Colombia, 2011]

The greatest casualty of war is that of the innocent. Make no mistake, combatant casualty is certainly tragic, but there’s not much worse than the suffering that is foisted upon the innocent. Rural Colombia is the setting for The Colors of the Mountain and we see fighting between government forces and guerrillas. Technically speaking, we don’t actually see much fighting at all between the two sides, but we do see the movements and machinations of both sides and we see the innocent lives that are upset and disturbed and lost. Here we see the lives of farmers, women, children, the elderly and others torn apart and disrupted by armed conflict. The local school teacher takes a small stand by painting over guerrilla graffiti and it costs her her livelihood. Families begin fleeing the conflict. We’ve all seen this type of thing before.

What really sets The Colors of the Mountain apart though is that nearly all of the main characters are children: Manuel, Julian and Poca Luz. Manuel receives a new soccer ball for his birthday and it makes him the toast of the kids in the village. Everyone wants to play with the new ball as the one they had previously was ragged and terrible. Shortly after receiving the gift though, it gets kicked into a vacant field. The kids discover the field is land mined when a farm animal wanders into it and is blown to pieces. The kids set about hatching a plan to get the ball back and take some incredibly stupid risks in the process.

The locals mostly try to ignore all that is going on, but eventually they can’t. Families flee. People disappear. Innocent bystanders are extorted and exploited by both sides of the conflict. Somewhere in the midst of all this turmoil, these kids try to lead a normal life: they go to school, they do their chores, they play soccer. The film’s power is in its subtlety. I don’t think many people need to be told that armed conflict is a terrible thing. Countless war movies before have shown that amply. The quiet grace of The Colors of the Mountain and its focus on bystanders is what gives it its strength.

The Pope’s Toilet [Uruguay, 2007]

In 1988, Pope John Paul II visited the small Uruguayan town of Melo during a 48 hour visit to the country. It was his first ever visit to the country and given Melo’s close proximity to Brazil, the townspeople viewed the visit as an opportunity to make a lot of money from visiting pilgrims by selling them food, drink, commemorative trinkets, etc. One enterprising citizen, Beto, decides that all of the pilgrims will need somewhere to go to the bathroom considering an estimated 50,000 people or more are expected to flood into the city and will overwhelm its lack of infrastructure.

Beto, his wife and daughter are impoverished, but he considers this his opportunity to better the life of the family and he spends all of their savings constructing a nice pay toilet for the pilgrims. Beto is a petty smuggler of goods that illegally crosses into Brazil and brings things back to shopkeepers in Mela on a near daily basis. He’s aging though and the long trip is wearing on his body. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get ahead.

The townspeople set to preparing for the influx of visitors that never materializes. It’s a heartbreaking tale of people trying to put themselves ahead only to fall further in debt. The film is a subtle critique of organized religion in that the pope comes to bless the town, but in the end, they’re all worse off after his visit than before.

The film isn’t based on a specific person but is described in the following way just after the opening credits:

“The events of this story are in essence true and it’s only by chance they didn’t occur the way they’re told here.”

It was obvious the plans of the townspeople were doomed from the start, but it was hard to not feel terrible for them anyway as it became painfully clear that only a handful of pilgrims would arrive (the postscript of the film claims only about 400 Brazilians showed up, but that the town erected 387 vendor stalls.) This is definitely one worth watching.

Trailer: The Pope’s Toilet