Sin Nombre

I went and saw Sin Nombre at the Bijou on Thursday. Sin Nombre is a tale of illegal immigration, interwoven with the story of a Central American gang member.

Sayra is a Honduran teen whose father returns to take her to New Jersey to live with family members. They walk to Mexico, where they have to sneak across the border and jump on top of a train with hundreds of other people also trying to make their ways north. Along the way they face delays, the border patrol, children throwing rocks at them (it's interesting as an American to watch the reaction of Mexicans to people illegally their country), and eventually a trio of gang members who try to rob them. Casper (or Willy) is a member of Mara 13, a violent Central American gang. He ends up on the same train as Sayra, trying to escape from his "homies" after being marked for death. Sayra decides she is going to help him, and the two form an unlikely (and mostly one-sided) bond.

I don't usually like movies that deal with a lot of violence, but I enjoyed Sin Nombre. There wasn't a lot of graphic violence (unlike in Gomorrah, which I disliked for other reasons as well), and I found the immigration angle of the plot fascinating. I ended up shaking my head a lot at Sayra and the decisions she makes, but her journey follows a kind of Sliding Doors path in that the decisions she makes may seem bad, but you never know how things would have turned out otherwise.

Right after I saw this movie I read an article on CNN about French filmmaker Christian Proveda who was killed in El Salvador on Wednesday by the Mara 18 gang, rivals of the MS-13 who were briefly portrayed in Sin Nombre. Proveda had been working on a documentary about street gangs. After I read about that, I did a little internet research on these gangs (like they're going to have an official website), and discovered that there are around 50,000 members estimated to be in the US, many is Los Angeles. It's scary to think about kids growing up in areas where gang life is the norm and membership may even seem necessary for survival (a young kid joining the gang was another important charachter in the movie).

Overall, I really enjoyed Sin Nombre's story, and I think it serves well to put a face to illegal immigration and how much some people will go through to try to get themselves a better life in the US.