Sin Nombre

Sin Nombre

 

Mexican/american film that does the south american-teenager-journey-towards-the american dream story justice.

Plot:

South american teenager who journeys towards the american dream.

Review:

I always wanted to see someone portraying this very human fate, the fate that is the journey towards "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" which "apparentely" is geographically located in North America. A movie that shows the quite, im sure, overwhelming, climactic (or anti-climactic), confusing and tough journey it must be. Heck, maybe it can even "humanize" immigrants to some greater extent. It could definetely be used politically, and be, atleast called, a documentary of sorts. Although this movie, to my knowledge, was greatly overlooked both in it just being "a movie" and also in any political or social awareness context. Perhaps humanizing immigrants is not such a interesting subject seeing as its not really what people in general define as "entertainment".

This story centralizes around two main characters which both are from Honduras. The first one being a member of the infamous Mara Salvatrucha gang and goes by the name Casper or as he is also called, young Willy. He is played by Edgar Flores. Having no intention of leaving his country prior to a difficult situation within the gang he is left with no choice but to run. Sayra ( played by Paulina Gaitan) is the other main character and she is reunited with her father and uncle in the striving for the promised land, as it were. Sayra already having family members in New Jersey, gets a note with a phone number that she is supposed to call when or if she arrives.

Sayra and Casper finds themselves on the same train and joins efforts to get to their shared destination but with two completely different motives.

Cary Fukunaga which is the director has made quite the job preparing for his debut film. Fukunaga's film feels authentic, which is quite crucial in a story like this, which probably has to do with the immigrants and emigrants he met prior to shooting the film aswell as having a number of great locations and actual Mara Salvatrucha members in it. Having spent two years doing research and actually doing parts of the train journey from Honduras to the U-S himself he was greatly prepared in all kinds of ways to make it the best debut film ive ever seen.





Trailer:



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