The feature film "Little Boy," known in Spanish as "El Gran Pequeño," opens nationwide throughout Mexico Sunday, May 10th, 2015. The film was shot at Baja Film Studios, Rosarito, and nearby Baja locations and features hundreds of extras cast from a talent pool stretching across both sides of the border.

The film is the result of five years' effort on the part of a team of Mexican visionaries led by writer and Smithsonian Institute Award winning director Alejandro Monteverde, whose debut film "Bella," won the "People's Choice Award" at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. "Little Boy" has already been honored in Japan where it was recently screened at the Hiroshima International Film Festival and garnered the Spirit Award for excellence in film-making.

The film is a story of remembrance: a small California fishing village during the last years of World War II, seen through the eyes of a seven year old boy. Many difficult themes are addressed in the film, among them bullying, xenophobia, prejudice, racism, war and death. But the main story-line is the bond between father and son, and the Little Boy's willingness to do whatever it takes to bring his dad back safe from the Pacific Theater of World War II, where he is a prisoner-of-war in the Philippines.

"I set out to make a film about the ultimate underdog," declared writer/director Monteverde, "and who is more of an underdog than a powerless Little Boy?" — especially one short of stature who is mercilessly teased by his classmates for being small. The little boy is also teased because he believes that if he has faith the size of a mere mustard seed he can bring his father back from war, provided all hatred is removed from his heart.

From a vantage point of seventy years, looking back, the film has a visual beauty that is a throwback to the kind of family films that were once the staple of Hollywood movie-making. For the film, an entire town was constructed on the back lot of Baja Film Studios, Rosarito, modeled on Norman Rockwell covers from the weekly Saturday Evening Post magazines of that time period. This vintage look is also generated in that Little Boy is one of the last films that is actually shot in analogue, not digital, format.

Little Boy is shot on once-standard 35 mm film using Panavision primary lenses. This was done deliberately to evoke the nostalgic feel of the period seen through the eyes of memory. It is this deep color saturation combined with a realistic "period" production design that leaves the viewer with the sense of being transported back to a simpler, more magical, era – even in the throes and turmoil of a world at war.

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"Why do they hate you?" the Little Boy asks Hashimoto, the despised Japanese/American man who has returned to his home after having been sent away to a U.S. internment camp during the major hostilities of World War II. "Because I have the face of the enemy," is Hashimoto's response.

The same question might be asked about the film "Little Boy" which, in spite of an 88% audience approval rating, struck out with Hollywood and mainstream critics with a 17% approval rating according to the website Rotten Tomatoes, which tracks such statistics. "I think we broke the record," Monteverde said of the rating discrepancy, "it's the first time there was such a large gap; we're talking almost 80 points."

How can such a disparity be possible between critics and the regular movie-going public? According to Monteverde, "'Little Boy' is a victim of labeling, similar to bullying. It was labeled as a faith-based Christian film and it is not a faith-based film. It is a film for everybody." But once labeled "faith-based," the critics beholden to the politically correct Hollywood line reacted with the revulsion of a vampire coming face-to-face with a bulb of garlic.

Ironically, movies like "Little Boy", now shunned by both Hollywood and the film-makers operating within the Hollywood system, used to be staples for the American public who thronged in record numbers to movie theaters throughout the 1940's and 1950's.

The disparity makes it apparent that much of current Hollywood film-making is agenda-driven, not market-driven, and nowhere is this more true than with so-called "faith-based" movies. For example: the 2014 film 'God's Not Dead," shattered box office records for an Indie film and garnered a 79% audience-approval rating compared to only a 29% favorable reception by mainstream critics.

Further, the film Son of God has a 21% critic's rating, versus a 73% audience score. Conversely, Hollywood's mega-budgeted, highly-touted Biblical screen epic, "Noah," received a 77% approval rating from the critics despite 58% of the audience not liking it at all because, according to reviewers, it veered so far away from scripture.

The film will be screened in both dubbed Spanish versions and in the original English language version with Spanish sub-titles. The film is appropriate viewing for the entire family but is rated PG-13 for some depictions of wartime violence.

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