Tomas de guerra

The filmmakers are middle-class residents of the capital (Bogota), working for a children's television production company. The movie is a video diary for approx. the years 1998-2002. They do an excellent job of explaining the context of the civil war, it's surprisingly balanced. Drugs, the guerrillas and paramilitaries, the struggle of institution-building, and poverty, are all discussed. It's quite a depthful and nuanced picture of the country, in contrast to the overall effect of most journalistic reporting about Colombia. The best part of the film is the way in which one of the filmmakers shows how the war has affected her two young children. The father struggles to answer the question, "If the guerrillas want good things, why do they do bad things?" This movie showed in Berkeley as part of the annual Human Rights Watch film festival. I encourage you to seek it out for yourself, if available.