Film

...However, their dreams are tragically thwarted by the hard economic realities of urban poverty...

...A voice-over narration would have provided the same history...

...The soldiers, though poorly armed and clothed, show a high level of morale...

...A father and son come to contemporary Istanbul from the provinces, hoping to earn enough money through street peddling to secure the son an education...

...The first violinist of a renowned string quartet dies, and the lives of its surviving members are thrown off balance when the group decides to take on a charming young replacement...

...Skylight recently released two of its own works concerning Nicaragua and Guatemala: Nicaragua: Report from the Front and When the Mountains Tremble...

...Though neither film is scheduled for television, both are being booked for theatrical distribution and should soon appear in major American cities...

...In its depiction of desperate efforts to cross the border from Mexico, El Norte is less harrowing than The Border, but it tells a more complete story...

...Cut to interviews with Nicaraguan civilians, soldiers, and Sandinista leaders: The citizens express support for the government, saying it has improved conditions by distributing land, organizing cooperatives, and extending educational opportunities...

...There's some good music—bits of Beethoven, Schubert, Ravel, and more— but the touted Pierre Mallet does little more than pose and look beautiful in the film's catalytic role...

...President Reagan comes on the screen, assuring Congress that "we do not seek its [Nicaragua's] overthrow...

...The Horse An outstanding product of the beleaguered Turkish socialist cinema, The Horse is in some ways reminiscent of the Italian neo-realist classic Bicycle Thief...

...Ml Hits and Misses El Norte Gregory Nava's second feature film, a contemporary Latin American version of Jan Troell's epic of immigration to America, The Emigrants, The New Land, beginning with flight from oppression in the native country, and ending in bitter disillusionment in "the land of opportunity" (regarded by Latin Americans as a mythical "North...

...None of these issues is directly addressed in the ninety minutes...

...And while the acting and scripting rarely rise above the adequate, there are compensations in beautifully photographed scenes juxtaposing underclass privation and the glitz of Los Angeles, displaying the purgatorial despair of Tijuana, and portraying Indian life in Guatemala's tropical highlands...

...Government plays a direct or indirect role, and in each one our Government is allied with repressive and reactionary elements...

...Menchu has survived the deaths of most members of her family, and she now lives in exile...

...Exceptional performances in the lead roles by Miou-Miou and Isabelle Huppert...

...A third brother, the secretary of an agricultural cooperative, was kidnapped, tortured, and finally burned alive...

...How do the Sandinistas justify curtailing the freedom of the press in Nicaragua...

...Is there, as Reagan claims, a destabilizing flow of Soviet or Cuban arms into the region...

...When the Mountains Tremble, a feature-length film, is more complex...

...Basileus Quartet A good idea, incompletely realized...

...The narrative centers on the hardships, dreams, and tragic disappointments of a young Indian brother and sister who escape the slaughter of their people in the highlands of Guatemala and become illegal aliens in the bewildering world of Los Angeles...

...One such enterprise is Skylight Pictures, most of the principals of which had a hand in making El Salvador, Another Vietnam and two CBS specials, Central America in Revolt and Guatemala...

...He and thirty-six others were burned to death when the police torched the building...

...Basileus Quartet ignores the fascinating process of the musical interplay and harmonization among four varied temperaments, and it has the distinct look of a work made for television...

...In the face of recent cutbacks in traditional sources of funding, the independents have demonstrated extraordinary resourcefulness—and no small amount of courage—to produce illuminating reports from the battle zone...

...We also witness the travails of increasingly disaffected Indians and mestizo urban laborers who come to swell the ranks of the rebel Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union...

...foreign policy toward both countries is related to American business interests...

...In the early 1950s, they decide to abandon their domestic lives and strike out on their own...

...Entre Nous (Between Us) The third feature film by young French writer-director Diane Kurys (Peppermint Soda), Entre Nous traces the lives of two women who come of age during World War II...

...Marine occupation of Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, the subsequent U.S...

...These sequences, although honestly identified, tend to undermine the credibility of other episodes where our trust is crucial...

...Each of the films incorporates historical background, something conspicuously absent from early reports on the Vietnam war...

...While working on plantations on the southern coast (Indians constitute the chief source of agricultural labor in Guatemala), one of her brothers died of malnutrition and another was fatally poisoned by pesticides the landlord sprayed during cotton picking...

...And the leaders share their well-justified fears of American intervention...

...The least effective moments in When the Mountains Tremble are scenes of historical reenactment, which draw from documentary material but appear rather unconvincing nonetheless...

...The commander acknowledges that his best men are former members of Sdmoza's National Guard, and an officer displays modern weapons that the filmmakers trace back to the U.S...

...But Edgar Chamorra", a "contra" leader, declares, "We will never fight just to stop the flow of weapons...

...Still, the film gets to the heart of the matter: The Sandinista revolution has brought some hope and tangible benefits to a majority of the country's population, and any reversal of this step forward would likely entail a reimposition of authoritarian rule—and possibly a national bloodbath...

...A Sandinista battalion seeking to flush out "contra" vandals engages them in battle...

...A round-faced Indian girl, however, knows exactly why she has joined the guerrilla forces: She wants a better life, and the government's unrelenting oppression of her people has driven her to the point where she sees no choice but to fight...

...He says he has been told he is hunting down "subversives," but he has no idea what crimes these people may have committed...

...support for the Somoza dictatorship, and the CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala's leftist Arbenz government in 1954...

...Department of Defense...

...Diverse documentary footage, cinema verite interviews, archival film, and television clips are tied together by the personal narrative and commentary of Ri-goberta Menchu, a young highland peasant woman of Mayan descent...

...In Nicaragua, the viewer meets "contra" leaders at a secret Honduran base camp...

...We are reminded of the U.S...

...A pleasant-looking young soldier, engaged in a mission of rural "pacification," is asked if he knows what he is doing and why...

...No such arms are in evidence in the film, but this proves nothing...

...Six of the invaders are killed, some equipment is captured, and the "contra" force is chased back across the Honduran border...

...The camera then accompanies a "contra" unit on a mission of sabotage and murder inside the Nicaraguan border...

...Are there limitations on civil liberties, and why have democratic elections been delayed...

...Writer-director Ali Ozgenturk has created some of the strongest and most memorable images to be found in any current motion picture...

...The women, seeking refuge in marriage, home, and children, establish an unusually close friendship...

...Rigoberta's saga is intercut with illustrative sequences depicting public ceremonies and counterinsurgency activities of the ruling military regime...

...In the hope of drawing attention to the plight of the nation's Indians, who are the majority in Guatemala, Rigoberta's father helped lead a peaceful occupation of the Spanish Embassy in 1980...

...Reagan says the United States is acting to curtail the flow of Soviet arms so that Nicaragua "does not infect its neighbors...

...These explosive events have received inadequate attention from the commercial news media, but fortunately, independent filmmakers have stepped in to help fill the information gap...

...No viewer could fail to notice that the portly generals and church officials are of light complexion and Spanish ancestry, while the guerrillas are Indians and members of the urban working class...

...One of the best films by and about women to appear in a couple of decades...

...Rigoberta and other villagers were forced to witness the brutality...

...Nicaragua evades some hard questions...

...More important, such dramatization is unnecessary, since it is enough to see and hear the participants on both sides of the Guatemalan conflict to understand that this is a class struggle with an ugly racist overlay...

...The films also examine the competing forces in each conflict, juxtaposing various perspectives and factions...

...He is only doing his duty, the soldier adds...