El Norte
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El Norte
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1995.
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El Norte (English: The North) is a 1983 independent drama film, directed by Gregory Nava. The screenplay was written by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, based on Nava's story. The movie was first presented at the Telluride Film Festival in 1983, and its wide release was in January 1984.
The drama features Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and David Villalpando, in their first film roles, as two indigenous youths who flee Guatemala due to the ethnic and political persecution of the Guatemalan Civil War. They head north and travel through Mexico to the United States, arriving in Los Angeles, California, after an arduous journey.
Why It Rocks
- It's recognized by critics as the first ‘independent epic'. While Robert Redford and Sundance are typically recognized as champions of independent cinema, El Norte marks Nava and Thomas out as contemporaneous pioneers of independent film in the United States. Indeed, while the film’s cinematography, editing, and sound merit awards as well for their poetic and deeply metaphorical design, the narrative itself heralded something new in the American film scene in 1983 by fully inhabiting the immigrant subject’s point of view, making El Norte an important early landmark of American independent film.
- The film shows the immigration process through the eyes of participants. Epic in scope, the film is broken into three parts: (Arturo Xuncax; Coyote; and El Norte). The first part starts in Guatemala, where political oppression threatens a native Indian village. Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa Xuncax (played by David Villalpando and Zaide Silvia Gutierrez) flee first to Mexico, then to the United States. Although specific in detail, their journey mirrors the general migration from Central America north in search of money and security.
- In the film's screenplay, Nava and Thomas zero in on a particular family, but add mythic qualities to the journey Enrique and Rosa take. The screenplay was based on years of research, but as Thomas told an interviewer, “Nobody goes to the movies to hear a lecture. We didn’t want El Norte to look like a docu-drama, or have any stylistic elements that would remind people of journalism or ‘rough-around-the-edges’ documentary. The style we aimed for is the dream realism that comes from Mayan culture.” Like the characters in Elia Kazan’s America America, the Amerindians here believe in spirits and spells, in folk cures and curses. The opening sequences succeed in building a dreamlike atmosphere.
- While written and directed by two Americans, the film is steeped in global history, starting with the organization of labor in Guatemala and its suggested connection to Che Guevara’s Guerilla Army of the Poor. This global perspective illustrates the perverse power of the American Dream in relation to harsh global realities. The film begins by espousing a political consciousness, with Enrique and Rosa’s father claiming that poor were only arms for the rich, but subsequently acknowledges how populist struggles across Latin America met with extreme violence as Enrique’s father is brutally murdered and beheaded. Without detracting from the brutality of this act, Nava treats this material poetically through graphic matches whereby the father’s visage becomes the moon and then a funeral drum. The treatment of this murder sets a precedent for the magical realist aesthetic the rest of the film will employ, as his father’s death continues to haunt Enrique. Throughout the film, images and sounds interrupt the narrative unexpectedly, reminding Enrique of what he flees and driving the film beyond simple narrative realism.
- American Dream is another major theme for the plot. For instance, upon arriving in Tijuana, coyotes sell the dream while Rosa and Enrique disembark their bus. A faded brown montage of Tijuana slums seamlessly cuts into a montage of California suburbs, with an emphasis on shiny red cars and sprinklers feeding green grass. This disjunctive montage lays bare Enrique and Rosa’s desire visually in a way that might communicate the unknowable experience of immigration to an audience situated in the global north. Despite the film’s critical focus on serious subjects such as military dictatorships, political murders, labor conditions, and precarious travel, the film eschews a neo-realist approach for a magical realism well-suited to both cultural translation and a more authentic approach to the cultures of Guatemala and Mexico.
- While the dual forces of violence pushing and dreams pulling them northward make up the first two sections of the film, the third lingers in two contradictory dimensions. One is the realization that California is unlike what Rosa and Enrique had previously imagined, and the other consists of the lingering vestiges of the American Dream that overcome this apprehension of California’s reality.
- Nava and Thomas insisted on shooting in Spanish with Hispanic actors, even though it made financing the film difficult. Although it definitely helps make the film feel more authentic.
- Incredible acting from the main cast, which is especially noteworthy since most of them aren't even professional actors.
Bad Qualities
- As a stylist, Gregory Nava is prone to overemphasis, to the use of close-up inserts to repeat points, and to forcing metaphorical meanings on material that may not need it.
- A viewer may be entranced by the appearance of butterflies during a departure scene, or distracted by trying to figure out how the shot was accomplished, or worried about whether or not the scene is symbolic.
- The dozens of lit candles featured in several interior shots can be seen as a romantic gesture, an idealized vision of beauty, or a fire hazard.
- As a director, Nava can be variable. A fight with a “coyote” who had promised to bring Rosa and Enrique across the border is shot and edited with precision and flair; the subsequent scene, involving U.S. Border Patrol agents, is garishly lit and flatly acted.
- The destinies Rosa and Enrique face are closely intertwined but also too schematic to be entirely credible. The culture they encounter in San Diego is seductive but corrupt, beset by literal rats in Rosa's case and metaphorical ones in Enrique’s. Nava and Thomas suggest that their Amerindian society in Guatemala is superior, but can offer only folk songs and colorful costumes as proof.