Sin Nombre Cinema Review

In a day and age where, as the maestro of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, recently put it, “cinema… increasingly resembles video games”, Cary Fukanaga’s feature film debut Sin Nombre (Without a name) must come as a breath of fresh air.

Every day hundreds of illegal immigrants from Central America risk their lives by getting on freight trains from the lower Mexican border to the US, in the hope for a better life. Sin Nombre, which can be described as part road movie, part thriller, part love story, portrays that journey and its life threatening hazards in such an authentic way that this hard hitting drama will stay with you long after the credits have rolled.

The stories of Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a teenager living in Honduras and hungry for a brighter future, and teen gang members Casper (Edgar Flores) and Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer), for whom the truly fearsome Mara Salvatrucha gang is their entire universe, become interlaced on a train to reach the US border in what turns out to be a life changing journey. Their story may be fictional, but the fact that it was filmed on board of a real train, smuggling real Central American immigrants, heightens the film’s sense of gritty realism to such a degree that it becomes hard to distinguish between touching documentary and nerve-racking drama.

Sin Nombre was both written and directed by American-born Fukanaga, who, remarkably, only has one short film to his credit prior to this, his feature length debut. Fukanaga’s meticulous preparation included jumping on a train himself for 27 hours, not only talking to immigrants but also witnessing a gang attack with his own eyes. In order to portray the world of the terrifying Mara Salvatrucha, or “Maras”, as accurately as possible, he also immersed himself in Mexico’s violent gang culture.

The result is a profoundly moving and humane film which extracts phenomenal performances from its young protagonists (who were all cast in Central America), and quite rightly won the “Directing” and “Excellence in Cinematography” awards at Sundance this year. I can’t wait to see what Cary Fukanaga, hailed as one of cinema’s most exciting new voices, will come up with next – his surely is a name to watch.