‘NICARAGUA’: GRAYING OF REVOLUTION

What sets “Nicaragua: No Pasaran” (They Shall Not Pass Our Borders) apart from most documentaries on Latin America is that Australian film maker David Bradbury perceives people and events in shades of gray rather than black and white. He may leave you with the undeniable impression that he’s pro-Sandinista and anti-Reagan, but his film (at the Nuart for one week only) is no blind endorsement of Nicaragua’s leftist regime.

Much of it is made up of interviews with the poor and oppressed, who describe their suffering under Somoza and their support of the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas are represented most prominently by their forthright minister of the interior, Tomas Borge, the only founder of the original Sandinista movement still in the government.

From Borge, we learn of his own torture and imprisonment at the hands of Somoza’s National Guard, his hopes and plans for an independent Nicaragua and his calmly expressed outrage at President Reagan’s views and actions. He admits to the well-publicized Sandinista mistreatment of the Miskito Indians for their dealings with the Contras, saying that “we were revolutionaries, not anthropologists.” He justifies the Sandinistas’ press censorship by stating that Nicaragua is in a state of war.

Borge and others hammer away at Nicaragua’s right to self-determination, which becomes the documentary’s main theme, along with its plea for the need for countries of differing social and political systems to live side by side in peace.

Bradbury, best known for his trenchant 1980 Oscar-nominated Vietnam account, “Frontline,” takes pains to suggest that the Sandinistas haven’t the enormous military support from the Cubans and the Soviets that President Reagan fears they do. (Bradbury states that Nicaragua gets most of its overseas support from the Western European democracies.) A young correspondent for English TV warns that what he views as Reagan’s ill-conceived aggressiveness could, in fact, drive the Sandinista leadership, which he describes as a mixture of Marxists and non-Marxists, into the Soviet camp. One of Borge’s major criticisms of Reagan is that the President is unwilling to accept the notion of Nicaragua’s revolution as a popular one.

“Nicaragua: No Pasaran” begins and ends with shots of the grief-stricken mothers of 17 Sandinista militia youths slain by Contras. The event takes place two days before the visit of the Pope, who, to the disappointment of the waiting multitudes makes no mention of the youths’ deaths and predictably stresses fidelity to the church, deflecting the crowd’s chant, “We Want Peace.” Clearly, the crowds, though disappointed, are loyal to the pontiff. This observation epitomizes the film’s view that institutions, whether political or ecclesiastical, can be valid without being perfect. Above all, “Nicaragua: No Pasaran” (Times-rated Mature) implicitly poses the question of whether any small country can remain truly nonaligned.

Playing with “Nicaragua: No Pasaran” is David Goodman and Deborah Shaffer’s “Witness to War: An American in El Salvador,” a 29-minute documentary on Dr. Charlie Clements, tops in his class at the Air Force Academy, a pilot in Vietnam and now a physician in the Salvadoran guerrilla zone.

‘NICARAGUA: NO PASARAN’ A New Yorker Films release. Producer-director David Bradbury. Camera Geoffrey Simpson. Associate producer Leah Cocks. Film editor Stewart Young. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 14 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.