Makingtr
SIN NOMBRE
Studio backing and awards at Sundance and Edinburgh Film Festivals have seen the Mexican immigrant-tale Sin Nombre become one of the most talked about films around. Selina Robertson meets the director
‘I have this weird thing that if I don’t do something that scares me then I feel that I have let myself down’, confesses Sin Cary Joji Fukunaga over morning coffee at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Tough words indeed from this 30something young blood from San Francisco, who certainly has a reputation for doing more that just talk the talk. As part of the research for his new film Sin Nombre, the writer-director went so far as to persuade his friends to travel with him to Mexico to ride the freight trains that carry thousands of immigrants every day from Central America and Mexico towards the promise of a something better in the USA. The experiences that came out of the journey, which ended up as a solo adventure after his friends jumped ship, form one part of the film’s narrative. Fukunaga doesn’t blame his friends, ‘All the people that we had met had been maimed, assaulted or raped on the trains. Not wanting to ride the trains is a very logical rational thing to do’.
Clearly this is a man who thrives on a challenge. Sin Nombre (trans: Without Name) was shot in just 38 days, mostly in areas around Mexico City. The story unfolds as an epic dramatic thriller with hundred of extras, a crew who for eight months previously had mostly been working on Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, trains, adverse weather conditions, nearly daily location changes, blood and other effects. All the classic ingredients of a western Fukunaga suggests, ‘not because I have studied western movies, but more because of the basic elements that are there, like the train bandits, poor immigrants that are crossing the countryside to get to a better land’. Even though big themes of lawlessness and bad guy turned good appear in the film, it’s the small pockets of daily life that he manages to so eloquently translate both visually and narratively that make this film essential viewing in the cinema. Working with trained and untrained actors who were cast out of Los Angeles, Honduras and Mexico, Fukunaga weaves two stories together. The first involves Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a young Honduran woman journeying with her father and uncle through Guatemala and Mexico to start a new life with relatives in New Jersey. The second involves Willy (Edgar Flores), otherwise known as ‘El Casper’, a sensitive gang member from the south of Mexico, who is told to take new recruit ‘El Smiley’ under his wing and board a US-bound freight train by night in order to rob as many immigrants as possible. It is here that Sayra and Casper’s paths cross.
‘A lot of the little moments, such as how people drink the water, the conversations you have, what you do when you’re waiting,
12 THE LIST 13–20 Aug 2009