When children are called to arms

As the boy knelt down, waiting for the bullet to rip into his head, Oscar Torres stood by a tree, sobbing. It’s not easy watching your 12-year-old self and your friends about to be executed, even if it’s only a cinematic echo of a long time ago.

That terrifying occurrence from the early 1980s still haunts Torres today. It also haunts “Innocent Voices,” the autobiographical film that the 33-year-old L.A. actor co-wrote about coming of age in war-torn El Salvador. Directed by Luis Mandoki (“White Palace”) and made on a slender budget, the Mexican-made feature was both a critical hit and an audience favorite at the Toronto Film Festival and is now Mexico’s official entry for the best foreign film Oscar.

Described by Variety as “a riveting tale of survival and how even war cannot diminish a child’s indomitable spirit,” “Innocent Voices” will screen today at 1 p.m. at the ArcLight Theatre in Hollywood as part of the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival.

And while the brutal Central American conflict that it depicts may seem distant to many Americans, Torres and co-author Mandoki believe that “Innocent Voices” speaks to a theme that reverberates powerfully today: the use of children as soldiers in fighting wars. At present, according to Amnesty International, there are more than 300,000 children worldwide bearing arms.

During the Salvadoran civil war, from 1980 to 1992, many boys barely entering their teens were forced into service in the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army, which was trying to quell a leftist guerrilla uprising. Though Torres himself narrowly escaped army service by fleeing to the United States, some of his friends did not. Others found themselves literally caught in the crossfire and did not live to tell the tale, as the movie harrowingly relates.

Mandoki says the main reason he wanted to tell Torres’ story is because so many children today are being forced to take up weapons in global hot spots such as Liberia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Colombia and, he suspects, Iraq. “We don’t know what’s happening in Iraq,” he says. “We don’t care about what’s happening to children in Iraq because CNN doesn’t show us those images. For me, [this] is a movie for the children of the world, for children who are in these circumstances, so that things might change.”

For Torres, finally facing up to a tragic episode from his past has provided a form of catharsis.

Raised in a small town that is now part of San Salvador’s sprawling suburbs, Torres was just a young boy when he became the man of the house -- his father left for the United States to get away from the escalating violence. His young seamstress mother, played in the movie by up-and-coming Chilean actress Leonor Varela, struggled to raise her three children in a leaky, tin-roofed home on the edge of their village. At night, stray gunfire from the battling soldiers and rebels would strafe the house, sending the children diving under their beds in terror.

“One of the things in war is you feel very ashamed for some of the things that happen,” Torres says. “They’re not your fault, but you feel that way.” As a child during the war, he says, he somehow felt responsible for his friends’ and relatives’ suffering. While watching “Innocent Voices” being made, that pain came rushing back.

“Seeing my mom, reliving that through this wonderful actress [Varela], seeing that from an adult point of view was unbearable, because you can’t help saying that all that pain should have never been, my little brother under the bed and crying, all that pain was unnecessary.”

Even harder was the scene in which Chava, the young protagonist played by Carlos Padilla, and several of his friends are rounded up by government soldiers who suspect them of aiding the rebels. Though in real life Torres was spared from death, some of his friends were shot, execution style, as he knelt beside them. “The execution [scene] was completely unbearable,” Torres says, “and I knew it would be before we went on the set.”

Yet as he and Mandoki reworked the script together, Torres says, the director encouraged him to put even more of his personal story into the film, through the character of Chava.

“It just opened up after that, and it became psychotherapy for the next three months. I actually had never talked to anybody about [these things] except with my family, but usually whenever we got to something we’d just change the subject,” he recalled. “Laughter is a good way to cover.”

“There were things he didn’t want to remember,” Mandoki concurs, recalling the time he asked Torres whether he ever had fired a gun during the war. “And there was this silence, and he said, ‘I don’t want to go into that.’ ”

For years after he immigrated to Los Angeles, Torres says, “I felt angry about everything.” His father had remarried since coming to America and started another family. After living briefly with his father, Torres moved in with an uncle who lived in Los Angeles. While attending Belmont High School, he became a film addict, spending his weekends at the State theater downtown watching three flicks for five bucks. “That was my escape from everything.”

Torres’ engineering studies at UC Berkeley ended when he began reading Latin American writers like Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. After a brief stint teaching English as a second language, he began auditioning for acting jobs and soon enough found himself in commercials. It was on one shoot, for AT&T;, that he meet Mandoki and slipped him a copy of his screenplay-in-progress for “Innocent Voices.” Three days later, Mandoki called him.

“It was a point of view of a war that I have never seen before, which is what happens inside a family when all the men have gone,” says Mandoki, who visited El Salvador with Torres during pre-production. Unfortunately, filming there wasn’t an option: The country lacks even a rudimentary film-industry infrastructure, Torres says. But the men found a stand-in in the mountain regions of Veracruz, east of Mexico City, where the movie began shooting last November.

The most difficult part of the movie was casting the crucial role of Chava, the young boy, who is on screen in practically every frame. Mandoki spent six months and looked at 3,000 kids before a relative who teaches children’s acting spotted Padilla passing the hat for his father, a mime, in a Mexico City park.

“I felt this boy has an amazing face and also a purity to him,” Mandoki says.

The project arrived at an opportune time for Mandoki, who moved back to Mexico City last August after 16 years in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. After his much-lauded first major film, “Gaby -- A True Story” (1987), about a wealthy European-Mexican girl with cerebral palsy, Mandoki moved to Hollywood and made a series of mostly lighter movies, including “Born Yesterday,” “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “Angel Eyes,” which were praised for their technical proficiency. In recent years, some critics have found his movies lacking in passion.

With “Innocent Voices,” Mandoki believes he has rediscovered that passion. “I think those critics are right,” he says. “Being away from Hollywood for a year has given me a different perspective. You can get lost there ... lose the reason why you’re making movies.”