El Norte [Region 0 NON-USA FORMAT]
by Gregory Nava
![El Norte [Region 0 NON-USA FORMAT]](/images/El-Norte-Region-0-NON-USA-FORMAT-B0009OPG3I-L.jpg)
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Actor: David Villalpando, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, Lupe Ontiveros, Trinidad Silva, Zaide Silvia GutiérrezDirector: Gregory Nava
Cinematographer: James Glennon
Writer: Gregory Nava
Editor: Betsy Blankett Milicevic
Producer: Anna Thomas
Writer: Anna Thomas
Producer: Bertha Navarro
Producer: Trevor Black
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language)
Format: PAL
Running Time: 139 minutes
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Force
Movie Reviews of El Norte [Region 0 NON-USA FORMAT]
Movie Review: Harrowing, true and masterful depiction of a tragic journey
Summary: 5 Stars
"El Norte" is one of the most scarring, deep, and harrowing movies I have seen. The film was directed by Gregory Nava (Selena, Bordertown and wrote the screenplay for Frida). It received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. This movie was made in response to the large scale extermination and discrimination of the indigenous people in Guatemala which forced many of them into a large scale exiled to the North.
The movie covers the plight of two young indigenous siblings (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and David Villalpando) who must escape their native Guatemala because of persecution against the indigenous people. Their father was murdered, the mother "disappears" and soldiers round up various people in their village, all because they wanted to form a labor union. Fearing for their lives, the two young siblings decide to go North.
Throughout the film we see the hard journey as they travel from Guatemala to the United States. They encounter poverty, blatant racism, discrimination, illness and death.
The movie employs the surroundings as another character, showcasing the beautiful coffee fields of Guatemala in contrast with poverty-stricken Tijuana, Mexico and the arid California town where the poor and rich live in visibly divided class lines. The film also uses magical realism, a widely used and important literary mechanism (see One Hundred Years of Solitude, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community), to show the influences of culture. Foreboding is also part of this film, as it comes full circle with repeated lines and images.
The film is nothing less than masterful and I equal how I felt when I was done watching it as the same devastating, catatonic, unable-to-cry-cause-I-am-in-shock-feeling from when I saw Requiem for a Dream. The film is devastating, true, and uncompromising in its depiction of these two young siblings and their sad and tragic journey.
It is one of the best and most realistic movies I have seen. There is a scene with rats when the siblings are crossing the US border. The actress, Zaide Silvia Gutierrez, insisted that she would do the scene herself with the rats. Nevermind that she had a phobia of rats. Such is the commitment of the writers (Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas), actors and director to this movie. It was something they believed in. It was a movie that is nothing less than excellent.
Summary of El Norte [Region 0 NON-USA FORMAT]
Australia released, PAL/Region 0 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: El Norte is a realistic picture of both the Guatemalan government's oppression of the Quiche Indians and the hard life of illegal immigrants in the United States. After the Guatemalan army destroys their village of San Pedro, two teenage Quiche Mayan Indian siblings journey north (hence El Norte) through Mexico to the United States to start a new life. The film opens with the destruction of the village and the peasants' pointless appeals to the authorities for justice. Realizing that the government is seizing their land, Enrique and Rosa make the difficult decision to leave their people behind. As they journey through Mexico, the siblings encounter a number of helpful individuals who direct them towards the U.S./Mexican border. There they find a 'coyote' (a professional human smuggler) and make the frightening run across border. Once across, Enrique and Rosa are introduced to the impossible realities of life as an illegal immigrant in Los Angeles. Living in constant fear of deportation, they struggle to survive as they are exploited by a series of employers. Eventually, their luck takes a turn for the better when the manager of their motel offers Enrique a job.SCREENED/AWARDED AT: Montreal World Film Festival, Oscar Academy Awards, ...El Norte
The audience for El Norte splits into two factions. There are those who, ever since its 1983 Telluride Film Festival unveiling, have spoken reverently of it as a great film, "a Grapes of Wrath for our time." And then there are those who find it a decent movie deserving of respect as passionate social protest, but seriously compromised by a Filmmaking 101 approach. Hailed as "the first epic" of the independent American cinema, the film focuses on two young Mayan Indians--sister Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) and brother Enrique (David Villalpando)--whose lives are shattered by the Guatemalan civil war. As one says to the other, "The past is gone forever ... you're my whole family now." They flee to Mexico with the ultimate goal of crossing into the United States--"El Norte"--where they hope for a new, secure life. The film aspired to put a face on the "invisible people," the shadow population of undocumented aliens that had become a key, though rarely acknowledged, element of the American economy--and if anything, the movie's relevance has grown more urgent over the ensuing quarter-century.
Directed by Gregory Nava, who wrote the screenplay with his wife Anna Thomas, El Norte portrays both the beauty and harshness of Rosa and Enrique's homeland; the low comedy and justifiable paranoia that mark their passage through Mexico, especially Tijuana, a "lost city" where everyone is "temporary"; and the culture shock of encountering America, where "even the poorest people have toilets." The filmmakers were after more than docudrama; their movie reaches for a mystical dimension, weaving imagistic and color motifs from native myth into the visual design, as well as incorporating periodic declarations about life on Earth being only a dream. The problem is that much of this comes off as earnest schematic rather than compelling cinema. The film is most alive in the presences of newcomers Gutiérrez and Villalpando; their actorly gifts are modest but sincere, and the mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation in their performances is genuine (they themselves were "without papers" as they shot their Los Angeles scenes).
This is one instance where the DVD extras markedly increase one's appreciation of the film, or more precisely, the fact that it exists at all. That's true less of director Nava's running commentary (which often sounds like a student displaying the note cards for his term paper) than of the accompanying featurette "In the Service of the Shadows: The Making of El Norte." Nava, Thomas, the two lead actors, and set designer David Wasco reminisce about the production, the effort of "a five-person crew in a VW van." Some of the stories are almost as harrowing as the film's most intense passages. These include a night in a remote Mexican village when the locals suddenly took umbrage at the film company's presence and formed into a mob--"anything could have happened, and no one would ever have known"--and a subsequent crisis when authorities seized reels of film and demanded a ransom beyond Nava's ability to pay. Apart from such melodrama-in-real-life, the documentary also impresses with revelations that, just as the Guatemalan sequences had to be shot in the Mexican states of Chiapas and Morelos (the civil war still being in progress), certain "Mexican" locations were convincingly replicated in Newhall, Calif.! "In the Service of the Shadows" is dedicated to El Norte's cinematographer, the late James Glennon (d. 2006), whose resourcefulness is gratefully remembered--shooting by candlelight in a town with no electric lighting--and whose artistry is abundantly apparent in the movie itself. --Richard T. Jameson
Stills from El Norte (Click for larger image)
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