Revolution #165, May 24, 2009


Check It Out:

Sin Nombre

We received the following from a reader:

Dear Revolution,

This is a movie all readers of Revolution (and millions more who are not yet readers of Revolution/Revolucion) should see. Sin Nombre is the powerful and moving story of Sayra, a young woman (Paulina Gaitan) making the perilous exodus from her home in Honduras to live with her father’s new family in New Jersey, and El Casper (Edgar Flores) who is running from the gang he was part of. On a deeper level Sin Nombre is really about the lives of millions of immigrants who every year are forced to leave their homelands in Central America and Mexico and make a perilous journey north trying to get to the U.S.

At a time when immigrants are being vilified, a time of work place and neighborhood raids, of violent separations of parents from children by Homeland Security—Sin Nombre has enormous heart for immigrants. Sin Nombre shows the desperation, danger, and dignity in the lives of the masses.

The director of Sin Nombre is Cary Joji Fukunaga, and this is his first feature film. Cary Fukunaga is 31 years old, and he casts very fresh eyes on this “typical” story, with a deeply compassionate desire for people to understand what immigrants go through. Fukunaga’s own journey to understand the lives of immigrants really began with a short film he did in 2004, Victoria Para Chino, the story of Mexican immigrants who were abandoned and suffocated in a locked truck in Texas. Fukunaga searched to learn about the experiences and plight of Central American immigrants who face degradation and brutality trying to come north to the U.S. To write his screenplay for Sin Nombre, he visited jails and prisons in Central America to talk with incarcerated people, and he rode the trains alongside the immigrants coming northward through Mexico, so that he could better understand and tell the stories of their lives as they live them. In recent interviews, Fukunaga said: “In terms of why I think I’ve become so fascinated with that world, I think that happened when I finally traveled with immigrants, was living with them, was dealing with some of the same issues and dangers they deal with, and then, at the same time, experiencing some of the camaraderie of traveling with them. That made it absolutely real [for me]. That was the moment when [I] actually felt part of something and could write about it. The characters in my film are all a collage of the stories I heard and the people I met.”

Go see Sin Nombre. This film dramatizes powerfully one more reason the world needs fundamental, radical, real revolutionary change.

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