Reviewed - Innocent Voices: After 15 years working on Hollywood movies, Mexican director Luis Mandoki returns home for Innocent Voices, an emotionally involving drama set during the civil war in 1980s El Salvador and shot on locations and sets built in Mexico.

The film views the conflict through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy, Chava, affectingly played by Carlos Padilla. Oscar Orlando Torres based his screenplay on his own pre-teen experiences in El Salvador, before he and his family fled to the US as refugees.

In a disturbing early scene, government forces take a group of 12-year-old boys out of school and conscript them into the military. From playing with toy soldiers, they are turned abruptly into boy soldiers. Their former playground becomes a battlefield, and soon they are wielding weapons almost as big as themselves.

The plight of children in wartime is a theme often neglected in movies dealing with conflict, although there have been some outstanding exceptions, such as Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants and John Boorman's Hope and Glory. While Mandoki's film is set two decades ago, it feels eerily timely, arriving in the wake of the shocking reports on the children who have become casualties of war in the Middle East.

Some of the most harrowing scenes in Innocent Voices show children caught in the crossfire, using mattresses as makeshift shields as bullets fly through their primitive homes. Although the movie is clearly on the side of the guerrillas, it does not shirk from questioning their activities and the danger that results. And when Chava's uncle offers to shelter the boy with the guerrillas, Chava's mother bluntly tells him, "Your side also takes boys."

Collaborating with Spanish cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía, who has worked on several films for David Mamet and James Foley, Mandoki demonstrates striking visual flair, setting the horrors of war against the great natural beauty of the environment.

The film closes on a caption claiming that more than 300,000 children are serving in armies in over 40 countries around the world.