Who Can Kill a Child?

Director Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? begins with seven minutes of punishing black and white documentary footage that details, again and again, the immense suffering that has befallen children throughout the twentieth century. These newsreels obscure nothing. We are asked to peer directly at the bloated bodies of innocents; the tiny, mutilated people who have either starved to death during a famine or been murdered by other genocidal apparatus. These episodes seep into the events of the film itself, recurring as a news report on a portable TV set that sits on a shop counter while an English tourist, Lewis Fiander's Tom, buys his wife, Prunella Ransome's heavily pregnant Evelyn, a few rolls of film so they can document their island-hopping adventure. Although the Spanish salesman who serves the couple is moved by the rolling misery on display, Tom and Evelyn are more interested in resuming their getaway. They are escaping reality, rather than embracing it. 

Filmed and released in the mid-1970s, Who Can Kill a Child? wasn't necessarily intended to be pored over with a mind to present-day paedological concerns but it is striking that this couple have, and it's stated a few times, deliberately left their children at home, denying them access to this sunny break. Similarly, the duo's nationality (within the context of a Spanish film) and Tom's self-appointed role of expert fails to arouse much sympathy for the duo either. They are very deliberately tourists, the kind of transplanted visitors who might deign to mumble a few words in the local language but are still comfortable enough to complain about regional customs and the crowds that they attract. Tom is fixated on a remote, nearby island that he holidayed on many years previously which has, in the meantime, become the flash point for a mass uprising of children. The specifics of this mutiny are left mysterious but the intent to kill any and all adults seems to be communicated psychically, child-to-child. It says something as well that the message is always so greedily received. Given the very real evidence offered upfront as explanation for this reprogramming, as well as the self-involved subjects navigating this turmoil, it's difficult to side against the revolting youth.