El Norte

Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life. It’s a story that happens every day, but until Gregory Nava’s groundbreaking El Norte (The North), the personal travails of immigrants crossing the border to America had never been shown in the movies with such urgent humanism. A work of social realism imbued with dreamlike imagery, El Norte is a lovingly rendered, heartbreaking story of hope and survival, which critic Roger Ebert called "a Grapes of Wrath for our time."


Overview
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.


All Movie Guide - Mark Deming
While any number of films have been made about plucky immigrants who come to the United States, few possess the plain-spoken honesty and simple emotional power of Gregory Nava's El Norte, at once a moving testimony to the thirst for freedom and a sobering look at the tragic consequences that the search for a better life can sometimes bring. Director Nava draws strikingly naturalistic performances from his entire cast (especially Zaide Silvia Gutierrez and David Villalpando), and his eloquently straightforward narrative style tells this story with few frills but a remarkable emotional impact. Blending humor, drama, suspense, and eventually tragedy, there are few films that say more about what America truly means than El Norte, which shows (for good and ill) how important this country is to those who left the land of their birth to live in this nation of immigrants.