A coruscating feature debut from Cary Fukunaga, winner of a Student Academy Award back in 2004, the film has taken major prizes from Sundance and Edinburgh and is released under the auspices of star producers Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna.
The plaudits are well deserved. This deceptively simple border-crossing drama puts the heart in a vice from the get-go. Casper (Edgar Flores) is a teen growing up on the Mexican-Guatemalan border and a gang member in the Mara Salvatrucha Brotherhood, when he winds up on the run. His terrifying trek bumps him against Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a Honduran teen, attempting to join her father and uncle on a New Jersey bound odyssey through Guatemala and Mexico.
The hardships faced are fierce and death-defying; El Norte has rarely seemed so far away. But Sin Nombre isn’t all about its harrowing neorealist grammar. It is, rather, a very old-fashioned movie, a primer in romance, action and mob warfare. The handy marketing label says This Year’s City of God, though it’s too sui generis, too striking for that comparison, however flattering and tonally apt it may be. No. Sin Nombre deserves to be This Year’s Sin Nombre and nothing less.