Decision to Win: The First Fruits
Made by the Salvadorean film collective Cero a la Izquierda (Zero to the Left), Decision to Win examines the daily life of people within the liberated zone of Morazon. The collective has made four short films about the Salvadorean revolutionary process, and this is their first feature-length documentary. “We think it is the most important,” one member of the collective comments, “because it describes the conditions under which the Salvadorean people are advancing this liberation struggle. In other pictures there has been a focus on the military aspects, making the revolutionaries look like a class apart, unique, almost mythical. And we wanted to show that this is not reality. The reality is the people--the peasants who sow the corn, who maintain the guerillas, who feed them; all of this goes into the organization of the liberation process. We wanted to present the war fronts as they actually are: very extensive zones which comprise one third of the country in which the population is organized for war necessities.”
Made precisely for educating people in the U.S. and other nations about the revolution in El Salvador, Decision to Win is shot and edited with high production values that are amazing considering the secretive and dangerous conditions under which the film was made.
Cuban documentary filmmaker Santiago Alvarez has commented, “This young Salvadorean collective has placed documentary film on an aesthetic and political level which should make every Latin American filmmaker feel proud.” American filmmaker Emile de Antonio calls Decision to Win “a present for the rest of the world from the filmmakers and revolutionaries of El Salvador. It is an exemplary film: passionate, moving, informative, intelligent and beautifully crafted. The film is not really necessary for the people of El Salvador; it is necessary for the people of the United States, to learn that there is a determined, truly revolutionary force that wants one thing: the right to be its own country and to change that country in a decent democratic manner.”