Such movies, of course, have special resonance in
"A big new talent arrives on the scene with 'Sin nombre,' " proclaimed Variety’s Todd McCarthy. "Fukunaga's enthralling feature debut takes viewers into a shadow world inhabited by many but noticed by very few."
Indeed, the movie's title refers to the relative anonymity of the millions of migrants, legal and illegal, who come to work in the United States.
But in "Sin Nombre," some highly memorable names, faces and personalities are attached to those desperate travelers, particularly the main characters: Sayra, a young Tegucigalpa native hoping to unite with her absentee father's "second family" in the New York area, and Willy, a Mexican outcast former member of the vicious, tattooed Mara Salvatrucha gang. Yoked by fate, they must make their way up Mexico's Gulf Coast and to the United States, where Sayra has waiting relatives and Willy has a slim shot at redemption.
During his research and subsequent filming in Mexico, Fukunaga met scores of such trekkers. One time, his train stopped in the middle of nowhere in pitch blackness and robbers attacked some of the passengers. Fukunaga later learned that the robbers had killed a Guatemalan boy who'd refused to cough up his meager savings.
He also met a Honduran man who made about $3 a day in a country where milk costs $1.
"Why is he going to the United States?" Fukunaga asks rhetorically. "It's not because he thinks our streets are paved with gold, it's not because he thinks life's going to be roses and flowers and hearts in the United States. It's because that's where he can make $13 an hour doing construction or something else and send most of it back" to his family.
Issues of immigration and identity cut deep in Fukunaga's own complex character. "What is Cary?" is the question
The facile answer is that he's a wandering spirit with a Japanese father, a Swedish mother, a Chicano stepdad and an Argentine stepmom. Yet, like "Sin Nombre," a daring mash-up of love story, action
Growing up, he shuffled from the suburbs to the country to the barrio ("Crips and Bloods, people getting shot") to the East Bay's hillside bourgeois enclaves.
His family, he says, always has been a "conglomeration of individual, sort of displaced people," recombinations of relatives and step-relatives, blood kin and surrogate kin, parents and what he calls "pseudo-parents" who treated him like a son.
From a political perspective, he regards the U.S.' decades-old immigration conundrum as a case of fairness and social justice. "We are a country of immigrants, and I don't know why it is a tendency for humans to forget that fact," he says.
On a personal level, his empathy for new arrivals and their stories seems related to his desire to embrace the parts of his own makeup. Tellingly, he describes the theme of "Sin Nombre" as "families in transition . . . the coming apart and re-creation of families in different forms. I grew up with families constantly in transition, different sort of iterations of it."
He may be the harbinger of a new type of Hollywood writer-director, the "post-racial" filmmaker, who can slip easily past the stolid walls of movie genres and steer clear of the cultural sentinels who stand guard over language barriers, insisting that Americans won't watch subtitled movies. (Uh, "
The new movie's catalyst was Fukunaga's 2004 short film "Victoria para chino," which screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and has won more than two dozen international awards. The 13-minute movie dramatizes a May 2003 incident in which at least 74 Mexican and Central American illegal immigrants being smuggled into the U.S. in a truck were overwhelmed by overcrowding and
After "Victoria" showed at Sundance, Fukunaga was asked by the Sundance Institute if he had a feature script. From a thick dossier of newspaper articles and other material, he began fashioning a screenplay from several converging story lines.
Fukunaga and Kaufman say they were moved by the
The contemporary migrant experience is no less lacking in poetry, or brutality. Among the hardest-luck cases are those who lack enough money to pay a coyote, or guide, to help them cross the border and must attempt the odyssey sitting on (or clinging to) a railroad car.
"Sin Nombre" captures their plight through an accumulation of details that convey the accents, slang, social customs, sights, sounds, smells and music of Mexico and Central America with a precision and authenticity rarely found in U.S.-made movies set in foreign climes. Fukunaga also visited prisons to interview gang members involved in human trafficking, and shelters serving young men and boys who'd lost arms and legs in train accidents.
Kaufman met with former Maras and agencies that work with them in Los Angeles. They shot on gang turf in Mexico, and a few gang members appear as extras.
They don't teach you this stuff at
"Cary took the challenge of making a movie in another language, about another culture, incredibly seriously," Kaufman says. "For him that meant that he had to be incredibly authentic, and with people on the set from
In casting the film, the crucial decision was to pair Paulina Gaitan, a young but experienced Mexican actress, with Edgar Flores, a much less polished Honduran actor. Kaufman had seen Gaitan in Marco Kreuzpaintner's "Trade" with
Speaking by phone in Spanish, Gaitan says it was challenging to affect a Honduran accent, but "the hardest thing was to get on the trains, because I'm afraid of heights. The first time I did it I was terrified."
However, Gaitan had no qualms about Fukunaga, despite his relative youth. She was particularly impressed at his knowledge of immigration. "When we found that he was a U.S. director and he knew about this, we all thought, 'Wow!' "
Flores turned up at an open casting call in Tegucigalpa and won the part both for his striking looks and ability to convincingly play a tough, if vulnerable, gang banger. "If you look at Edgar's eyes, he's not acting," the director says. "That's just street."
At the beginning, Fukunaga says, "We had to really, like, discipline him, because he would just drink or he'd do whatever. He didn't understand sort of like the opportunity that was given him. But he ended up doing an amazing job."
Fukunaga brought an intense physicality to the set, Kaufman says. "I never saw Cary once sitting in a chair behind a monitor. When Paulina had to get in the river, and the camera guys had to get in the river, Cary got in the river. When someone had to be on top of the train in the rain, Cary was on top of the train, in the rain."
Fukunaga seems hard-wired to take risks and make order out of chaos. No doubt his agent hopes that won't entail death-defying acts for every film. But Fukunaga already is mapping the next journey out of his comfort zone. He's hoping to write and film a modern musical, possibly in tandem with composer and
Metaphorically, if not literally, Kaufman says, "Cary has to ride the train for every movie."
reed.johnson@latimes.com
