Manuel (Hernan Mauricio Ocampo) is a soccer-crazed boy who lives in rural Colombia. His farmer father, Ernesto (Hernan Mendez), gives him a ball for his birthday, replacing the ratty, beat-up ball that he used previously. Manuel and his friends play with the ball on the town’s only soccer field, until one day when an accident involving a runaway exploding pig reveals that the field is mined, probably due to military helicopters occasionally landing there to fight guerillas. But the kids don’t pay much attention to the conflict; the important thing is the ball. It’s plainly visible from the hill overlooking the field, and just sits there among the mines taunting the boys. They devise all sorts of crazy schemes to get the ball without accidentally setting off a mine, including lowering the albino, near-blind Poca Luz (Genaro Aristizabal) from a tree with a rope, or when Manuel throws small stones in his path to see if they explode, and then when they don’t, hopping on the exact spot where the stone hit the ground, getting ever closer to the ball.
In the background, the adults are getting caught up in the crossfire between illegal militias. Guerillas are demanding that all residents of the town join their side, and that Ernesto comes to their meetings. Ernesto doesn’t want to take sides; he has heard there are paramilitaries in the area that would kill anybody who collaborates with the guerillas, and mostly he just wants to be left alone to farm in peace. But even as he wants to ignore the illegal armed groups, the illegal armed groups don’t want to ignore him. One by one, students at Manuel’s school begin leaving, displaced by the violence and fleeing to anywhere else that will have them. Eventually, the teacher, who arrived from out of town, is also asked to leave after she covers some guerrilla graffiti on the school walls with a mural painted by the students.
The children’s acting in this film is fabulous. It would be easy to just make the kids as cute and tragic as possible, but the film just makes them seem normal. They don’t always understand what the adults are talking about, and are often told to stop listening in when the subject of local violence comes up. When Julian (Nolberto Sanchez) shows Manuel a bullet he has that can supposedly take down a helicopter (obtained from his guerilla brother), it almost doesn’t seem any more real than when I played with G.I. Joes at their age. The natural feel of their innocence is all the more remarkable considering that the cast is mostly comprised of non-actors from Northwestern Antioquia near the Panamanian border, where the movie was filmed. The scenery is also breathtaking, like one of those little rural mountainside towns you pass on the colectivo on your way to some other grand destination here. When the teacher gives Manuel a set of pencils to encourage his artistic ability, he sets about painting his own version of the landscape, which resembles a lush green Colombian Valhalla.
The Colors of the Mountain won the Audience Award at the Cartagena Film Festival, and has made the rounds at other festivals around the world. Director Carlos Cesar Arbelaez has said in interviews that he was inspired by Iranian film, and the movie moves at a fairly languid pace, letting you soak in the small-town ambience so that when the violence hits, it seems inexplicable. A sleepy farm town in the mountains, what could go wrong? In Colombia, everything can go wrong.
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