SIN NOMBRE
As someone who helps people with various immigration issues...that’s right when I’m not writing I’m an immigration lawyer but that’s a long story for another day...I could not help but be grateful to see a film like this. Every day I see or deal with people who are what we immigration lawyers call foreign nationals and what the Department of Homeland Security calls “aliens.” I thought I knew their stories but until I watched Sin Nombre I didn’t truly understand what so many of them go through to get to the U.S, or to anywhere that holds the promise of a new and better life.
Sin Nombre, unlike other recent immigration films, The Visitor or the fine documentary by Ellen Kuras, The Betrayal, isn’t the stranger in a strange land story; it is about getting here. Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) is a Honduran teenager who embarks on the journey to America with her father who has been deported but needs to return to his new wife and daughters in New Jersey. This story runs parallel with that of Willy (Edgar Flores) also known by his gang brethren as El Casper. We see Willy recruit a youngster “Smiley” (Kristyan Ferrer) to join him in the local division of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, headed by a tattoo covered villain named Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejía). Eventually their Sayra and Willy’s paths cross but this isn’t a love story in any conventional sense.
Cary Joji Fukunaga wanted to focus his attention on a social consciousness film when he was planning his NYU 2nd year project. He landed on immigration after reading about the Texas case where a truckload of immigrants had suffocated to death. While researching he discovered the specific experiences of Central American immigrants passing through Mexico, experiences he thought of as “inherently cinematic.” From that effort he made an award winning short film which he has now expanded to the feature, Sin Nombre. Fukunaga spent months doing background interviews, including prison interviews with Mara gang members, and then shooting in Mexico and the result is a film that opens a window into a world not much seen.
The result is a visually rich, social realist alternative road movie. There is no car, there is barely any sense of the romance of the open road. Here the road is a dangerous place with border patrol agents and gangs lying in wait. Add to that the physical danger of riding on top of a train for the entire length of Mexico. At the same time there are stops along the way, camps where people can clean up and eat, where there is respite. My only reservation about the film is that the climax may be a tad too predictable and telegraphed too clearly early in the film. Yet it does not entirely mar the juxtaposition of cinematographic beauty and narrative harshness. For all those who think immigrants don’t deserve to be here, don’t work hard, etc, etc, this is a film to put those lies to rest. It also captures what people are fleeing from and maybe even why boys wind up as Maras. I still say though, that if you’ve got the drive to navigate your way from Central America on the top of a train to the United States, you most definitely deserve more than a chance to stay. Isn’t that the kind of entrepreneurial ambition and work ethic we always say we welcome?
Sin Nombre opens in Los Angeles March 20, 2009.
Written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga; produced by Amy Kaufman, Pablo Cruz, Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal; director of photography, Adriano Goldman; edited by Luis Carballar and Craig McKay; music by Marcelo Zarvos. Released by Focus Features.
With: Paulina Gaitan (Sayra); Edgar Flores (Willy/El Casper); Kristyan Ferrer (El Smiley); Tenoch Huerta Mejía (Lil’Mago); Diana García (Martha Marlene); Luis Fernando Peña (El Sol) and Héctor Jiménez (Leche; Wounded Man).
