A movie about the people behind war. not war itself

Rating: 10/10 (10 February 2012)

There have been few films that have left me pondering for days after and which have left my heart pounding incessantly hours after watching it. This has been one of those few films and it brought this reaction because of the incredible way in which it made the audience use all of their senses. From the beginning, you begin to wonder what is this movie about? All you see are two boys playing in the sand and pretending to be soldiers and you might think that it will be a movie about war. And then, Flor finds that rifle and you see the Nazi plane flying overhead and you realize that this is not just a war movie; it is a movie about the loss of innocence and the tragedy and horror that war brings to everyone – whether they chose to be a part of it or not.
And we see that Flor chose to become a part of the partisans in their fight against Hitler and once again, we begin to think: perhaps the film will be about Flor and the horror he goes through as he fights in the battlefield. However, once again, when Flor is left behind, we see that this film will not be in the battlefield. Instead, we get to see all of the pain that Flor must go through as he returns home, as he realizes what he has lost, and as he fights to stay alive. And up to a point, we see that Flor is still smiling. Though we see and feel his pain, we see him still laughing as him and his 'friend' go to still a cow. To me, this was one of the most important scenes, because throughout this whole instance, we only see Flor as he laughs and is joyful about they have just done. The camera work done as they show the point of view of the friend as he sees Flor in one continues long take was incredible to me. It showed how much innocence and happiness this small boy still felt even after having gone through the horror he had already seem. And yet, this is the last instance in which we see Flor smile and laugh.
After this, everything else makes you feel the war as if you were there. You can feel and touch and smell everything that is happening to the point that, for me, perhaps you cannot fathom how humans can ever commit such atrocities. The burning villages brought back to me images from one other film that has had effects like these on me – Schindler's List. For a few seconds after seeing that, all I could think of were the faces and corpses of the Jewish population who fell victim to the Nazis – images which were then imprinted onto my mind when Flor shoots Hitler's picture. From the whole movie, this last scene to me, was the most powerful. It made me even more aware of the humanity that this small, innocent boy had lost because of war. And what made this more powerful was how he aged so fast in this film, because it was true. By the end of this movie, he was no longer a boy. He was a grown man who had seen and felt far more than what any of us could imagine.