Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty) stars as George, a Glasgow bus driver who risks his job by giving a free ride to a beautiful Nicaraguan woman with no money. From the moment that he sees her, George becomes infatuated.

Robert Carlyle stars as George, a Glasgow bus driver who risks his job by giving a free ride to a beautiful Nicaraguan woman with no money. From the moment that he sees her, George becomes infatuated. He soon finds her a place to live and learns the reason behind her sadness - her boyfriend has probably been killed by the Contras. George accompanies her to Nicaragua where he helps her come to term

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I think that's what makes this film so real, powefull and thought provoking one.

4 of 4 found the following review helpful:

What if?Oct 11, 2006
By Hiram Gomez Pardo
As always, Ken Loach made of a simple story, a revealing, breathtaking and hard to forget movie around a Scottish bus driver and a Nicaraguan woman.

Inch by inch, a worthy film to watch.

5 of 6 found the following review helpful:

I WORKED FOR ACCION PERMANENTE CRISTIANA POR LA PAZ IN 1987: SAME AS THIS FILM AND IT IS REALOct 29, 2007
By C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer"
Coincidentally I worked in Nicaragua during the time and setting of this film and it is too real. I also knew Anita Setright who plays herself on our old front porch, although nearly ten years later as the film was made in 1996 or so. She still smiles benevolently in this movie. Seeing the contra attacks and their effects, the vehicles, and the walls and murals are very real to me. Too real.

Okay so the romance seems a bit hockey and the Paul Laverty narrative has a few gaps (how does she get quickly from her mother's house to La Experanza when the others have to hijack a bus? How does she learn really good English in only about seven months of exile in the British Isles? As an ESL teacher myself, I really want to know! How does Scott Glenn's character turn so quickly from CIA trainer in torture and attack one year to peaceworker the next, unless he's a CIA plant infiltrating the Accion Pte., as I so often suspected, and one by the way who makes stylistic criticisms of people's reports of contra war crimes: "We're Witness for Peace, not War and Peace"?).

And as many house parties as I attended, with cumbia and palo de mayo music, etc., I never saw anyone do a split. Nice to hear the Nicaraguan marimba.

Well, there's some holes in the narratives, especially in Glasgow (can a driver really empty and hijack the double decker bus to go for a joy ride with a new prospect? Can a double decker really drive on mud without flipping like an SUV or van? Can Paul Laverty ever get heterosexual love right?), but the action in Nicaragua could be newsreel; it could be straight from the photos and videos we used to record the contra atrocities funded and trained by the Reagan/BUSH administration and Ollie North and Negroponte (who has had such a high position in the current Iraq chaos - these war criminals do not get fired as they deserve; they get rehired!). In fact the action was really too real for me, except that Loach-Laverty always soften things up a bit. The US directed contra would have replaced Antonio's tongue with more intimate organs, as so often recorded, and not left him alive. Would Carla herself have survived her injuries out in the field?

Laverty and Loach do try to present socio-economic realities and projects in a dramatic and engaging way, but please do follow up with primary sources such as Christianity and Revolution: Tomas Borge's Theology of Life. Let this movie be a portal to the reality of this history and a warning for our present dirty little war. Nowadays all those old women and girls living out on the farming coop would be targetted for airstrike as insurgents, and my Catholic Church ambulance would not long have gone deep in the mountains and through the rivers as we always did (with me wondering how much longer). Sad the day we stopped to pick up the teeth of some beloved fellow parishioners, and the lady who ran the marriage orientations, after their pick up had hit a US supplied Claymore mine.

This movie bears much reality. See it. The Sandinista National Liberation Front candidate Daniel Ortega has again been openly, freely and fairly elected president of Nicaragua (twice more than Bush). La lucha sigue.

And I am another who wishes for English subtitles for the ancient Pictish English of Glasgow, possibly a locale because some residents there still wish for their own national liberation from London. An unstated irony.

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