You’ll probably be exhausted by the end of Paolo Tizan’s documentary observing young men, many of them teenagers, participating in a highly rigorous training program conducted by the Peruvian military. The filmmaker spent ten months embedded with the recruits hoping to serve as soldiers in the region known as VRAEM, where much of the country’s coca plants are grown and drug trafficking takes place. , receiving its world premiere at the , immerses you in the recruits’ training so thoroughly that you come away feeling as if you’ve gone through it yourself.
Eschewing narration or intertitles, the documentary offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the young recruits as they go through their paces, beginning with a parachute jump. Every part of their bodies is measured, as if they were prize stallions. They’re shown talking about their lives in highly personal terms, such as one young man who says that he grew up afraid of his father, who beat both him and his brother when they were young.
Now he wants his dad to be proud of having a military son, but when he speaks to him on the phone it immediately becomes clear that their relationship is severely strained. When he calls his mother, she offers comfort but little help. The training is brutal and frequently dangerous, as evidenced by one of the film’s most intense scenes, in which a trainee accidentally gets shot in the chest and has to be stabilized in the field.
At one point, three recruits, jeeringly referred to .
