It is an image fit for a brave horror movie: In the back of a semitrailer, a group of Mexican immigrants grows restless, thirsty, frightened. The American driver has pulled into a border checkpoint. Through an air hole that the truck’s human cargo has gouged, the moans and cries of an ailing toddler can be heard.
Or such is the fear. And fear makes people do sad things.
In 2005, Cary Fukunaga’s terse, visceral short “Victoria Para Chino” won a Student Academy Award as well as an Aspen Shortsfest prize.
It was based on the story of a truckload of immigrants who suffocated when left outside Victoria, Texas.
As fine a short as “Victoria para Chino” was, it couldn’t fully prepare audiences for the emotional breadth and artistic depth of his debut feature, “Sin Nombre,” which opens today at the Esquire Theater.
“Sin Nombre” is a rough and generous look at immigration from the migrant perspective. Sayra and Casper meet atop a freight train. She’s a Honduran headed to the United States and its promise with her father and uncle. He’s a gang member fleeing certain retribution.
“With a simple, classical story, he tells one of humanity’s most dramatic stories,” says Gael Garcia Bernal. The actor-director, along with his friend and actor Diego Luna, is an executive producer of the movie. Their Mexico City- based company, Canana, co-produced the film.
“We came on board four years ago,” say Bernal. “It’s such a tough subject, in many ways an act of bravery.”
It’s been a wild ride for Fukunaga since winning the directing prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “Sin Nombre” also won a jury prize for its cinematography.
But the most demanding ride came when the director hopped trains in Mexico to do research.
Born in Berkeley, Calif., and raised in the East Bay area, Fukunaga has traveled extensively. He wasn’t daunted — at least not intially. And he’s fluid in Spanish, which explains his comfort shooting “Sin Nombre” in the tongue of his characters.
“The research process was essential to really understanding that world and re-creating it with confidence” he says. “I always liked the process of meeting people, of observing people. That’s one of the best things about filmmaking.”
He read articles about migrant journeys. One, “Enrique’s Journey,” won the Pulitzer Prize for Los Angeles Times reporter Sonia Nazario. Still, he says, he had to experience firsthand the trek Central Americans take by train through Mexico on their way north.
“Meeting gang members, traveling on trains, there’s no way I could have made the film without doing that. I don’t know what it would have been like.”
He went to Mexico with two friends who were producers on “Victoria Para Chino.” The trio planned to ride the rails together. After dire warnings (“there had been rapes, a derailment”), the two friends bailed.
The first night, there was an attack. Someone was killed.
Fukunaga also drank all his water that first night.
“I was so nervous after the shooting,” he admits.
“It was an amazing journey, because it was my first time,” he recalls. “There were moments of beauty and camaraderie and moments of absolute fear.”
“Sin Nombre” captures, beautifully, that heady mix of conflicting feelings.
