Like his ‘children’s film’ The Secret of Roan Inish, Sayles’ Spanish-language Men with Guns takes the form of a myth. An old Indian woman tells her daughter a story about an utopian doctor in a ‘Big City’ in an unnamed and totalitarian Latin-American country. This Humberto Fuentes (Federico Luppi) is a rich man whose wife has just died. In the face of his children’s disapproval, he decides to take a trip to see his former students who work for the poor Indian population in a remote corner of the country where there was no medical aid until recently. When he arrives, Fuentes meets his best student, but the others have disappeared. The rumour that they have been killed by ‘men with guns’ is denied by the authorities. The doctor, whose political position was at first shaped by ignoring cruel reality, becomes increasingly involved with the fate of the local people. On his quest for his students who have disappeared, he meets the deserter Domingo and the former priest Padre Portillo as well as the little orphan Conejo who is his guide.With this metaphorical journey by the doctor Fuentes, in which a clear distinction is made between not knowing about oppression and not wanting to know, John Sayles makes it clear that everyone has the duty to go looking for injustice.
