Jan Kees de Rooy

Alsino, a boy of 10 or 12, lives with his grandmother in a remote area of Nicaragua. He's engulfed in the war between rebels and government troops when a US advisor orders the army to open a staging area by the boy's hamlet. Alsino tries to be a child, climbing trees with a girl, looking through his grandfather's trunk of mementos and trying to fly; he goes to town to sell a saddle, has his first drink and is taken to a brothel. But the war surrounds him. The US advisor takes Alsino on a chopper flight, but he's unimpressed. The soldiers' cruelties awake rebel sympathies in Alsino, and after an army assault backfires, the lad is fully baptized into the conflict.

In this film, residents, workers in the metallurgical industry, peasants and Mapuches, talk about their expectations and their criticisms of the revolutionary process, reflecting in their comments and opinions the tensions that the country was suffering at this historical moment, a few months before the dramatic events of September 11, 1973.

Documentary about the process of socialist transformation initiated by the Unidad Popular government, a review of its difficulties and achievements, on the eve of the parliamentary elections of March 1973.