Carla’s Song, a 1996 drama by Ken Loach, stars Robert Carlyle and Oyanka Cabezas. Set in 1987, Scottish bus driver George Lennox meets Carla, a Nicaraguan exile living a precarious, profoundly sad life in Glasgow. George takes her back to her village in northern Nicaragua to find out what has happened to her family, boyfriend, and country. Notable for its real and gritty location shots, in both Scotland and Nicaragua, Carla’s Song is enjoyable and touching and, notes its writer, Paul Laverty, “is just one of thousands of statistics, hopefully reminding the viewer that everyone in this war had a story.” Carla’s Song was awarded a gold medal at the Italian Film Festival in Venice.

The World Stopped Watching, a 2003 Canadian film by Peter Raymont and Harold Crooks, was shot in 56 mm. Nicaragua dropped from the spotlight after the end of the Contra war. This documentary, shot in late 2002 and early 2003, picks up the pieces of what happened next. Essentially, this is a sequel to The World is Watching, a critically acclaimed documentary from the 1980s, involving many of the same characters.

Walker, a bold 1987 anachronistic biography of the infamous soldier-of-fortune from Tennessee, starring Ed Harris. Filmmaker Alex Cox (of Sid & Nancy fame), wanted to show that “nothing had changed in the 140-odd years between William Walker’s genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons.” One reviewer wrote, “What is so amazing about Walker is that it got made at all. It’s a film condemning capitalism funded by a capitalist studio. Since it was filmed on location, its production money went straight into a country that the United States was currently at war with.” Critics mostly panned the film as “sophomoric black comedy,” but confirmed Nicaphiles will surely get a kick out of familiar scenery.