El Norte
The North

Of all the films I plan to run for my celebration of 1984, El Norte has, unfortunately, aged the least. This independently produced drama by husband and wife filmmakers Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas became the first Latin American film to be nominated for a screenwriting Oscar. Roger Ebert (the source for everything I knew about foreign cinema when I was a teenager in 1984) called the film “A Grapes of Wrath for our times,” and it was screened in countless high school classrooms on VHS and 16mm, which is how I first saw it. El Norte tells the story of a young brother and sister, indigenous Mayans who flee ethnic and political persecution during the Guatemalan Civil War and embark on a risky journey north to the U.S. The film unfolds in three chapters. The first sets up the lives of the film’s young protagonists, who become targets after their father attempts to form a labor union among the coffee pickers in their rural village of San Pedro. The second follows them through their sometimes horrifying, sometimes humorous journey through Mexico with the assistance of a coyote who guides them across the border. The last third explores their arrival in “the promised land” only to discover how difficult it is to live as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. 

It’s a story that is, unfortunately, as relevant today as it was forty years ago—the only real difference being that those who enforced the border laws in the mid-'80s were a bit less deadly, with many understanding the critical role undocumented folks played in the stable economy enjoyed back then. The film's last chapter explores how powerless cheap labor is exploited by multiple businesses and provides a glimpse into the underground economy that forms around the legitimate industries of construction, restaurants, textile work, and house cleaning. Part of what makes the movie so memorable is how funny it often is, even when depicting the difficulties of escaping dangerous situations or working in a land where you barely speak the language. The picture also features a spiritual/metaphorical component that's not quite magical realism but not simply the visualization of thoughts unfolding in the minds of the characters. Robert Redford tried to do something similar four years later in his film The Milagro Beanfield War, but what we get here feels much better integrated into the story.

The two leads, Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and David Villalpando, are attractive and engaging actors who create deeply sympathetic characters. Only viewers with hearts hardened by the constant bombardment of anti-immigrant propaganda will be unmoved by their story and see them as outliers rather than indicative of most migrants. The film spends just the right amount of time in Guatemala to give us a sense of why these characters must leave and enough time in the US to demonstrate what they could contribute to our society. Despite the fact that a great deal of what happens to these two actually makes them lucky in comparison to many of their fellow crossers, the story is not especially upbeat. What makes it so engaging is the simple yet beautiful way it's shot by James Glennon (who would go on to photograph Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, Randal Kleiser’s Flight of the Navigator, and several movies for Alexander Payne), the eclectic and evocative score, and the performances of the entire cast. 

The film made a major impression on critics and audiences when it was released in January '84. It was nominated by the Academy, not for Best Foreign Language Picture, but for Best Original Screenplay. The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Nava and Thomas followed up the success of this film by making A Time of Destiny (1988) with William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, and Melissa Leo, and My Family (1995) with Jimmy Smits, Esai Morales, and Edward James Olmos. Nava would go on to write and direct the wildly popular Selena (1997) starring Jennifer Lopez as the Tejano music star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez; and he and Thomas contributed to the screenplay for Frida (2002), Julie Taymor’s aclaimed film about the Mexican surrealist artist Frida Kahlo.