A powerful portrait of Tomas Borge

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"Nicaragua: No Pasaran. " A New Yorker Film release. Produced and directed by David Bradbury.

"Nicaragua: No Pasaran" is a powerful documentary made by David Bradbury, the Australian film maker who directed "Frontline" the award-winning film about Vietnam. It is being released early in November at the Film Forum in New York and in San Francisco, Boston, and other cities.

The film focuses on the Sandinista leader Tomas Borge, the only surviving FILM REVIEW founding member of the movement, as the representative of the revolution. In his interviews with Bradbury there is projected the character of a man of great inner strength, hardened by all he has endured in the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, but also a man of humanity and humor.

Borge, in the political underground for 19 years, spent six of those years in prison, much of the time in solitary confinement. His wife was tortured, raped, and murdered by the National Guard, and he himself was tortured in an effort to cause him to reveal the information he had. He did not do so. He was finally rescued when the Sandinistas in a sensational operation captured the parliament and negotiated his and other political prisoners' release in exchange for the release of the deputies.

Bradbury shows Borge not only "Nicaragua: No Pasaran. "

interviews but mingling with crowds of ordinary people, with whom he exchanges solemn embraces. This is not the phoney heartiness, the smiles, waves, and glad-handing of American politicians "working" the crowd. We perceive the respect and affection of a people with whom Borge is united in a grim determination to stand up to the colossus which is threatening to crush them.

Bradbury effectively uses cuts from a film of Reagan addressing Congress on the "threat" from this country of 2.5 We also see Reagan stating that the Sandinista government 'insulted and mocked the Pope."

In a highly dramatic sequence we then see what actually happened.

The Pope's visit