Released in 2010, this year WOW film festival has giving its audience an opportunity to see The Colors of The Mountain, a little known drama from Colombia, on the big screen. Whilst its age does show, with the whole thing looking like it was shot in old handheld cameras, it’s a drama that manages to get your heart pounding over something as simple as a football.
The story centres around Manuel, a nine-year-old boy who loves football and wants to become a goalkeeper, as well as his two friends. Through their eyes we see the adults around them having to deal with and avoid the civil unrest between the military and guerrilla rebels, a tried and tested technique that some of the finest filmmakers have used in the past.
To try and make sense of such complex issues, we see events play out from the point of view of childhood innocence. Manuel is constantly on the outside of private conversations and debates between adults, never fully recognising or understanding the gravity or danger of the situation.
He and his friends are brought into the danger, however, when his brand new football is one day kicked into a field full of mines. Desperately, the three boys make numerous attempts to retrieve the ball, with each time proving just as gut-wrenchingly tense as the last.
On many occasions, I was forced to watch the film through my hands out of sheer fright as to what was going to happen; but whilst it works in these taut sequences of danger, I have to say that it otherwise failed to leave any real long-lasting impression.
The performances are wonderful, especially the one given by Hernán Mauricio Ocampo as the young Manuel, but in spite of these few individual elements, The Colors of The Mountain doesn’t quite hit the same high notes of the other films seen in this year’s line-up so far.
WOW Film Festival opens at Chapter cinema in Cardiff on Friday 17 March before heading to Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Small World Theatre Cardigan, Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea, and Theatr Clwyd in Mold. See www.wowfilmfestival.com for full details.
words JOE RICHARDS