Sin Nombre.

Economic migrants are certainly getting a bad press at the present time. What are economic migrants other than people who want to improve their lives for both themselves and their families? Some live in conditions and countries that people would not let their precious dogs live in, so why let people? Admittedly some folk just see another country as having something different to offer be it sunshine or perhaps better schooling for their kids. I myself was an economic migrant some 23 years ago when I choose to move my family to another country. One in which my children were offered a better education system and somewhere where they could actually venture outdoors without adult supervision. Obviously my situation was nowhere near as serious and heart rendering as the migrants we see in the 2009 Mexican-American thriller Sin Nombre.

Written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga who was born in the USA but whose parentage was Swedish/Japanese. Fukunaga was responsible for directing all eight of the first season of the award winning HBO TV series True Detective, a truly remarkable piece of work, as is his debut feature film.    

 

El Caspers only chance in life is joining Mara Salvatrucha and its leader Lil Mago.

Seeking the promise of America, a beautiful young Honduran woman, Sayra, joins her father and uncle on an odyssey to cross the gauntlet of the Latin American countryside en route to the United States. Along the way she crosses paths with a teenage Mexican gang member, El Casper, who is manoeuvring to outrun his violent past and elude his unforgiving former associates. Together they must rely on faith, trust and street smarts if they are to survive their increasingly perilous journey towards the hope of new lives[1].

Shot mostly in Mexico City and filmed in Spanish, the film's title means "Nameless", it won several awards, including prizes for directing and cinematography at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. It evokes the hardship and violence of a society that gives no real hope for a future or a life. The only opening for disinfected youth is to join a gang where your life can be cut short at any time. Who can blame these people and others in the same position from trying to improve their lives even at great risk to themselves demonstrated in this excellent movie and in the BBC news programmes over the past months?  

Several of the extras used in the film were actual migrants. Fukunaga said of working with them, "I didn't have to tell them anything—they know how to sit on top of a train” The film stars Paulina Gaitan (We Are What We Are) as Sayra and Edgar Flores as El Casper. The executive producers included Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal. This harrowing authentic movie is recommended for those of you that profess a social conscience and in fact it would not do the back bottoms that don’t have a social conscience any harm to watch it either.

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[1] Focus Films.

The Golden Dream.

Economic migration is a subject that I wrote about when I blogged Marc Silver and Gael Garcia Bernal’s documentary Who Is Dayani Cristal (2013) which unlike The Golden Dream (2013) was about those poor souls that do not make it alive across the Mexican border into America to start a new life. This new movie by Spanish born Mexican director Diego Quemada-Diez is a feature film that looks at the ever-worsening situation from the viewpoint of teenagers but still highlighting the criminalisation of the migrants just for the terrible crime of wanting a better life. This movie could so easily be a documentary as the story is based on real life testimonies collected over a six-year period.  The complete cast are non-actors with Quemada-Diez carefully choosing his non-professional main leads with the remainder of the cast being local people.  

Its Spanish title is La Jaula de Oro that basically translates as The Gage of Gold, which is how the migrants refer to America, the great dream that has a pot of gold at the end of it for all who make it across the ‘border’ into the vast capitalist wasteland that is the USA. This is why so many try to make it across this inhumane, man-made border. There are allegedly 15 million migrants working under the equivalent of modern slavery without any form of documentation, a grand supply of cheap labour that may pay tax but have no rights! 500000 migrants are locked up in American prisons.

The journey away from poverty is a dream! 

We are shown, in quite graphic detail, the hardships that these people encounter even before they get anywhere near the crossing point. When we first meet the three youngsters they are living their poverty-stricken no hope lives in Guatemala.  Juan, Samuel and of course Sara, who has attempted to disguise herself as a boy, all set out with their dreams intact. Chauk, a young Indian who cannot speak Spanish, joins them on their travels.  Quemada-Diez concentrates on these four characters and the viewer is invited to become an observer and empathise with the trials and tribulations of this long journey from the children’s home country across Mexico to the States. Travelling mainly on the top of goods trains along with many others who are on the same journey, all of who are constantly being taken advantage of, exploited, robbed and beaten. 

 

Juan and Chauk learn to understand each others culture during their traumatic experiences.   

Sara has to disguise herself as a male to give her any chance of fulfilling her dream of a better life.  

The film mirrors their journey; periods of boredom sitting atop of a train in searing heat with little or nothing to eat and drink are intercepted with periods of extreme action. The director admits to being influenced by the British social realism movement, filmmakers like Andrea Arnold and Lyne Ramsey but mainly by Ken Loach who Quemada-Diez had worked with on his Spanish Civil War drama,  Land and Freedom (1995), and it shows in the finished product. By the end of the film you would honestly question if the hardships of the migrants have been worth it or have they just exchanged a poverty that they know for poverty they don’t know. Is there really a Golden Dream at the end of the rainbow? Certainly not on this evidence.

The man made border!

Diego Quemada-Diez. 

Just a point, if all countries were equal and wealth was shared would there be any need for borders? The director lays the blame for the complete situation well and truly at the door of the USA claiming in an interview that ‘free trade agreements with the US, combined with decades of intervention and destabilisation in Central America, have caused profound inequality, poverty and violence, provoking millions to flee north’.  There is an awful lot more to this movie than I have described and I would not want to spoil it for those of you that want to see this highly recommended piece of cinematic reality.

Santa Sangre.

It has been a while since I have seen Alejandro Jodorowshy’s avant-garde film Santa Sangre (1989) but with its recent re-release I thought it might be just the time to reassess this marvellously bizarre cult movie. At it’s most basic it’s the story of Fenix, a boy who grew up in a circus, we follow him through his adolescence into his adult life. But this film is not your basic coming of age drama. Were taking about a film that was made by an underground Chilean filmmaker who specialises in surrealism and the theatre of the absurd and who is obsessed by shocking imagery that can include, blood, lots of blood, inhumane violence, nudity, mental disability, mutation, real freaks of nature and God forbid we forget, religious themes and devotions. Which can all be found in Santa Sangre (Holy Blood), the closest he has come to making a movie that would fit the horror genre, and incidentally his most accessible and accomplished film if you don’t believe me give El Topo (1970) a try described by one critic as ‘the most shocking and controversial head-trip ever made’[1] but that may be the subject of a further ramble.

Written by Jodorowsky along with Dario Argento’s younger brother Claudio and Roberto Leoni and shot in Mexico City it relates how Fenix mother Concha (Bianca Guerra) a demented circus trapeze artist who is also the leader of a religious cult worshiping a shrine to a local girl who was raped and murdered after having her arms cut off. When Concha finds her husband, the circus master Orgy (Dean Stockwell’s brother Guy) having sex with the ultra flexible Tattooed Women she pours acid over his private parts. He in turn cuts off both his wife’s arms in revenge before cutting his own throat. Fenix is an unwilling witness to these events and thereafter looses his sense of reason and is assigned to a mental institution. When we next see this damaged individual he is a young man and formulates his escape. Meeting up with his mother he is forced to become her ‘arms and hands’ standing close behind her assisting with not only her theatrical act but also with her more private moments.

The ultra flexible Tattooed Lady.

The best description of this film is by David Flint who describes it as ‘a dazzling effort which successfully blurred the boundaries of art and exploitation, mixing scenes of darkly poetic beauty with moments of outrageous gore and violence, blending bizarre imagery and ideas into an ostensibly conventional narrative to create something genuinely unique’[2]

Fenix helps his mother during theatrical and more private moments.

Yes this is a genuinely unique experience full of surreal moments and one in which music forms an integral part of the dialogue. Made by a man who is too often dismissed by those who denigrate artistic freedom, for the rest of us: go see this movie your find it a real treat!!

A film that includes religious themes and devotions.

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[1] Alan Jones.

[2] David Flint notes for the Anchor Bay DVD release in 2003.

Los Bastardos.

Two none actors play the parts of Jesus and Fausto.

The basis of Spanish director Amat Escalante’a tense and uncomfortable 2008 movie Los Bastardos is the mistreatment of immigrant workers in the United States. The film opens with a very long shot of two men walking along a man made dry river bed, the type that’s used for flood relief. It transpires that these two men are to join a group of other Mexican workers waiting at a busy Los Angeles intersection where employers come to pick up cheap illegal labour to carry out manual work with no questions asked. We follow the two Mexicans we first see, one appears much younger than the other they could almost be father and son. With four other workers they are transported to a new build site to clear rubbish and dig out the foundations for a minimal rate of pay. During this period we learn that the older of the two, Jesus (Jesus Moises Rodrigues) is trying to raise money to enable his elderly Aunt to have an urgent eye operation that will save her sight. Even with the help of his colleague Fausto (Ruben Sosa) he soon realises that the daily manual labour they provide will not raise the required sum of money. There only hope is to except a lucrative offer from a man who requires the contract killing of his wife!  Handed a holdall that contains the money and a sawn-off shotgun they set off to find the address they have been given, but the question is will these two characters have the balls to carry out their murderous mission?

Karen with her unresponsive son.

Its never explained why the husband wants his wife Karen (Nina Zavarin Requiem for a Dream 2000) killed although when we meet her we realise that she does has problems of her own including an unresponsive teenage son and a drug habit. Slow and precise with long shots that add to the tension, the director makes a lot from nothing but when something does happen it will arouse you from your comfort zone. A sort of Mexican Funny Games (1997, 2007) co-produced by Carlos Reygades who directed the another great Mexican drama Battle in Heaven (2005)