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.
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.
The pain may be temporary, but it’s also very common in the course of the training, as illustrated by a harrowing sequence in which we watch recruits being deluged by torrential jets of water that nearly knock them off their feet. The harsh military mindset endemic to the process is illustrated when they’re told that they must know how to die, but “to know how to kill is the most important.
Tizan, here making his feature debut, takes pains to show that his subjects, aspiring to be fierce warriors in one of the most dangerous regions of Latin America, are also ordinary young men at heart, plagued by girlfriend problems and avidly watching war movies on their phones. The poignant moments in which they reveal their youthful insecurities stand in stark contrast to the physical rigors and harsh military mindset to which they’re being subjected.