The latest, and perhaps best, of these surprises is John Sayles’ Men With Guns. Set in an unnamed, South American country, it features dialogue in Spanish (and other, native languages) with English subtitles, and stars only one recognizable American actor, Mandy Patinkin, in a small role. The story centers around a successful, aging, urban doctor, Dr. Fuentes (Frederico Luppi). Three years earlier, the doctor participated in a program to train and send out medical students to the wild, uncivilized parts of the country. There the young doctors were to treat the “Indians,” people troubled by poverty and an endless series of battles between the military and roaming bands of guerilla rebels. Dr. Fuentes has come to think of this program as his legacy. By chance one day, he learns that the doctors he trained have encountered some vague sort of catastrophe in the wilderness. He then decides to travel alone into the dangerous territory to learn for himself what has become of his pupils.

Through the rest of the film, we follow Dr. Fuentes on his quest, which begins as an immersive and shocking cultural experience and slowly, subtly develops into an allegorical treatment of violence and the human condition. The doctor quickly learns firsthand the problems his pupils faced. Whenever he returns to his jeep after having left it alone he finds things missing from it, and each village that he seeks out shuns him for fear he will draw the attention of the soldiers. Still, one by one a few social outcasts join the doctor on his travels—a young boy with no family, a military deserter, a devastated priest, and a mute rape victim. They see Dr. Fuentes as an opportunity, a way out of their own dilemmas, but to him these people are clues to his mystery. Through their eyes both the audience and the doctor learn about an existence dominated by soldiers and guerillas, each group of them indistinguishable from the next—men with guns, archetypal oppressors.

Heavy symbolism runs through the entire film. From the opening scene with Dr. Fuentes giving a military officer an anal exam, Sayles cues us into the film’s spirited subtextual level. But it is in the end that the story finally steps into a wholly mythical realm. The doctor’s party loses its priest and must go on without him. They push on into the mountains, searching for another of the doctor’s pupils who is rumored to live with the Indians in a brigadoon-like sanctuary, a place invisible to soldiers and attainable only by the pure of heart. This ending comes off as a desperate grasp at hope, and is perhaps not entirely satisfying. Still, it dares us to face the likely truth that desperate hope is the daily bread of desperate people.

The film is not a typical project, even for an independent filmmaker—especially considering that after his last film, Lone Star, Sayles was embraced by the Hollywood mainstream with a second Academy Award nomination for screenwriting.

Yet neither is Men With Guns a simple flight from success, an ego-driven attempt by an aloof artist to deconstruct his distinctive style and thus maintain some aura of the unpredictable around himself. The film flows directly from Sayles’ long-time interest in different cultures and in representing the case of the social Other. And his artistic choices here do a fitting job of serving the material. Sayles might easily have cheated the story to make a more accessible and less poignant film. Instead Men With Guns is something extraordinary—a foreign film by a domestic director, a film challenging its audience to accept and come to terms with the role of the outsider.