“Sin Nombre” is a fantastic debut for Cary Joji Fukunaga – an epic about all the harrowing obstacles that illegal immigrants from Central America face before they ever even reach the U.S. border, if they even make it that far. You can appreciate this movie whatever your politics because it’s refreshingly free of preaching and lectures and messages. I’m against illegal immigration but I still got caught up in it on an emotional level. Fukunaga simply presents a straightforward story concerning Sayra, a Honduran girl about 15 y/o and Willy, a Mexican boy a little older, maybe 17 y/o. The viewer is left to draw his or her own personal conclusions regarding the Big Picture of illegal immigration and Third World poverty and colonialism and imperialism and exploitation and economics and gangs and so on. I can remember seeing a TV newsmagazine segment a few years ago on how these migrants cross Mexico on the tops of cargo trains. Not inside the boxcars, but clinging to the tops of the cars. Apparently, the interiors of the cars are too dangerous because of bandits and/or rapists and murderers – both free-lance thugs and organized gangsters. At any rate, the whole scene is totally lawless. Anybody who attempts this journey is taking their life into their own hands. They’re beset upon by not only the aforementioned bandits, but also the Mexican authorities, who seem entirely unsympathetic, to put it mildly. At the time I thought: “What a great premise for a movie!” Seems like Mr. Fukunaga agreed.
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I think the trailer gives away too much already, so I’ll try to be careful what I say here. Willy is a member of Mara Salvatrucha and Sayra is making her way North when their paths intersect atop a train. Willy makes a moment-of-truth decision that permanently and irrevocably disrupts his life and suddenly binds the wide-eyed Sayra to his side from that instant on. Then the chase is on and it’s a great one.
This movie is not only extremely graphic, but also very true-to-life and thoroughly realistic. For example, there’s a scene where an unarmed Willy is being hunted by two gunmen and I figured he would simply turn the tables on them and get their guns. After all, Sylvester Stallone would just laugh if it was a mere two killers after him, right? Sylvester would then easily kill them both bare-handed in a few seconds, right? Even with his eyes closed if he wanted to. But then I realized that Willy without his own gun and without his gang was just a scared boy running for his life like a rabbit. At that point, I realized just how good this movie was and I really got into it.
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Fukunaga gets uniformly fine low-key and histrionics-free performances out of his entire cast. Not a single weak link among all of them. The two leads are obvious standouts but there’s a lot of superb work by the other actors. Lil’ Mago is absolutely terrifying; a figure straight out of a nightmare but still seeming human. Martha Marlene is funny and very touching when we realize what her fate is going to be. Smiley is right on the money – a great peformance by a child actor. Scarface reminds us that not all of the Mara Salvatrucha are kids; some of them actually survive into their 30’s and 40’s and so on. I think the guy playing El Sol gets somewhat overlooked. His character doesn’t have Lil’ Mago’s eerie appearance but he manages to be every bit as scary just the same.
Also, Mr. Fukunaga clearly knows his Shakespeare. Willy has two different relationships that both echo “Romeo and Juliet” and there’s a scene at the end that’s a modern version of “Et tu, Brute?” from “Julius Caesar”. But what I like most about him is his obstinacy. He was given a Sundance Studios green light to make a film and he came up with a Spanish language epic made in Mexico with an all-Hispanic cast. Not a single gringo in sight, but don’t let the sub-titles discourage you from experiencing a top-notch, extremely well-made, deeply moving film. Go see it and buy the DVD when it comes out – it’s that good.
Sin Nombre has it all – great acting, beautiful cinematography, powerful themes, and amazing realism. The realism is no accident. Young filmmaker Cary Fukunaga spent months in Mexico, interviewing both immigrants and gang members about their experiences. He shot on location, and many cast members are nonprofessionals. For example, Edgar Flores, in the lead role as a member of the Chiapas chapter of the brutal Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, is straight off the streets of Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Despite the specific setting of the tumultuous U.S.-Mexico border, Sin Nombre addresses powerful and universal themes of damnation and redemption. At least, that’s how I saw it. In an interview, Fukunaga himself said he sees it as being about family – “the disintegration and recreation of the family unit in its unique and varying forms.”
The plot centers around a chance and fateful encounter between gang member Willy and a 15-year-old Honduran girl, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), who is riding north through Mexico atop a train. Though Sayra’s journey, viewers get an appreciation for the intense dangers faced by Central Americans trekking toward the promised land.
Without giving away anything, I can tell you a bit of background on how the film came about. Fukunaga, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, was in film school in New York when he read a New York Times story on a group of Mexican and Central American immigrants who died of asphyxiation and heat exhaustion while trapped and abandoned inside a refrigerated trailer. His short 2004 documentary about that case, “Victoria Para Chino,” won multiple film awards.
That project evolved into Sin Nombre, as Fukunaga explained in an IndieWire interview. Doing the research, he said, “I learned about the awful journey Central American immigrants went through in order to get to the United States – crossing the infinitely more dangerous badlands of Mexico on top of (not in) freight trains bound for the US Border. It was like a world that belonged to the old wild west.”
Against the advice of friends, Fukunaga gained intimacy with his topic by taking the same harrowing train-top ride that he would film. On his first ride, with 700 Central American immigrants, the train was attacked within three hours:
“We were somewhere in the pitch black regions of the Chiapan country side. In the alcove of the next train car I heard the distinct pops of gunshots, always louder than they seem in the movies, then the screams of immigrants passing the word: ‘Pandillas! Pandillas!’ (gangsters). Everyone scattered, I could hear them running in past our tanker car. Not having any where to run to, I stayed on…. The next day I talked to two Hondurans who were next to the attack. They told me a Guatemalan immigrant didn’t want to give two bandits his money so they shot him and throw him under the train. [Later] I learned the police had found the body of a Guatemalan immigrant, shot and abandoned…. Nothing could have driven home the sensation of fear and impotence than what I had felt first hand with those immigrants.”
Fukunaga’s willingness and ability to see through the eyes of others probably owes much to his upbringing. Fukunaga is described in an L.A. Times article as “a wandering spirit with a Japanese father, a Swedish mother, a Chicano stepdad and an Argentine stepmom [who] can’t be reduced to the sum of his parts, ethnic or otherwise. Growing up, he shuffled from the suburbs to the country to the barrio (’Crips and Bloods, people getting shot’) to the East Bay’s hillside bourgeois enclaves. His family, he says, always has been a ‘conglomeration of individual, sort of displaced people,’ recombinations of relatives and step-relatives, blood kin and surrogate kin, parents and what he calls “pseudo-parents” who treated him like a son.”
With this background, Fukunaga was able to capture not only the immigrant experience, but the pathos of gang life in Central America and Mexico, with brutality and hopelessness transmitted from generation to generation. Sin Nombre doesn’t give the history or context for the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), which at 100,000-strong is widely considered one of the most fastest-growing and dangerous gangs in the world. But you can get that elsewhere on the Web.
In brief, the MS-13 is an outgrowth of the 1980s war in El Salvador, which led to a massive migration of up to two million refugees into the United States. Many settled in the Ramparts area of Los Angeles, where the gang was founded. Strict U.S. immigration policies in more recent years have paradoxically worsened the gang problem, allowing the MS-13 to gain footholds in Central America and Mexico. The MS-13 is known for its vivid tattoos, but some say members are moving away from tattoos because they so brilliantly illuminate gang membership for authorities. A documentary on the MS-13, Hijos de la Guerra (Children of the War), can be previewed at hijosdelaguerra dot com.
Sin Nombre is getting universal acclaim, and richly deserves the directing and cinematography awards it garnered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
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