Product Details

• Actors: Paulina Gaitan, Marco Antonio Aguirre, Leonardo Alonso, Karla Cecilia Alvarado, Juan Pablo Arias Barrn
• Directors: Cary Fukunaga
• Writers: Cary Fukunaga
• Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Spanish
• Subtitles: English, French
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Universal Studios
• DVD Release Date: January 3, 2010
• Run Time: 60 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B002FHGESI
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,918 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
  • #63 in Movies & TV > DVD > Foreign Films
• For more information about "Sin Nombre" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Although the phrase never appears in this documentary-style Spanish-language thriller, sin nombre means "nameless." First-time California filmmaker Cary Fukunaga tracks two such individuals, emblematic of many immigrants, whose narratives converge by the suspenseful ending. Willy (Edgar Flores), a Mexican native who belongs to the brutal Salvadoran brotherhood Mara Salvatrucha is just trying to make it through each day alive, while Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) seeks a better life for herself by traveling from the Honduras to join relatives in New Jersey. Their worlds collide on a freight train heading north as Willy and his brethren relieve Sayra and her companions of their few valuables. When the leader of the Mara attempts to have his way with her, Willy steps in, making himself a target, and the couple races for the border before the gang catches up to them (just as Willy gets separated from his best friend, Sayra gets separated from her family). Winner of directing and cinematography awards at Sundance and produced by Y Tu Mamá También's Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, Sin Nombre takes a frustratingly long time to get cooking. The actors, some non-professionals, give persuasive performances, but the Mara are so reprehensible, the first act makes for tough going. Once Willy breaks free from their stranglehold, however, he starts to engender some sympathy. As with the desperate Columbian drug mule in Maria Full of Grace, it's hard not to root for him and Sayra to beat the odds in order to start fresh in the States. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Product Description

Seeking the promise of America, a beautiful young woman, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), joins her father on an odyssey to cross the gauntlet of the Latin American countryside. Along the way, she crosses paths with a teenaged Mexican gang member, El Casper (Edgar M. Flores), who is maneuvering to outrun his violent past. Together they have to rely on faith, trust and street smarts if they are to survive their increasingly perilous journey towards the hope of new lives.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent chase flick, May 15, 2009

By 

Ben Dover - See all my reviews

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"Sin Nombre" is a fantastic debut for Cary Joji Fukunaga - an epic about all the harrowing obstacles that illegal immigrants from Central America face before they ever even reach the U.S. border, if they even make it that far. You can appreciate this movie whatever your politics because it's refreshingly free of preaching and lectures and messages. I'm against illegal immigration but I still got caught up in it on an emotional level. Fukunaga simply presents a straightforward story concerning Sayra, a Honduran girl about 15 y/o and Willy, a Mexican boy a little older, maybe 17 y/o. The viewer is left to draw his or her own personal conclusions regarding the Big Picture of illegal immigration and Third World poverty and colonialism and imperialism and exploitation and economics and gangs and so on. I can remember seeing a TV newsmagazine segment a few years ago on how these migrants cross Mexico on the tops of cargo trains. Not inside the boxcars, but clinging to the tops of the cars. Apparently, the interiors of the cars are too dangerous because of bandits and/or rapists and murderers - both free-lance thugs and organized gangsters. At any rate, the whole scene is totally lawless. Anybody who attempts this journey is taking their life into their own hands. They're beset upon by not only the aforementioned bandits, but also the Mexican authorities, who seem entirely unsympathetic, to put it mildly. At the time I thought: "What a great premise for a movie!" Seems like Mr. Fukunaga agreed.

I think the trailer gives away too much already, so I'll try to be careful what I say here. Willy is a member of Mara Salvatrucha and Sayra is making her way North when their paths intersect atop a train. Willy makes a moment-of-truth decision that permanently and irrevocably disrupts his life and suddenly binds the wide-eyed Sayra to his side from that instant on. Then the chase is on and it's a great one.

This movie is not only extremely graphic, but also very true-to-life and thoroughly realistic. For example, there's a scene where an unarmed Willy is being hunted by two gunmen and I figured he would simply turn the tables on them and get their guns. After all, Sylvester Stallone would just laugh if it was a mere two killers after him, right? Sylvester would then easily kill them both bare-handed in a few seconds, right? Even with his eyes closed if he wanted to. But then I realized that Willy without his own gun and without his gang was just a scared boy running for his life like a rabbit. At that point, I realized just how good this movie was and I really got into it.

Fukunaga gets uniformly fine low-key and histrionics-free performances out of his entire cast. Not a single weak link among all of them. The two leads are obvious standouts but there's a lot of superb work by the other actors. Lil' Mago is absolutely terrifying; a figure straight out of a nightmare but still seeming human. Martha Marlene is funny and very touching when we realize what her fate is going to be. Smiley is right on the money - a great peformance by a child actor. Scarface reminds us that not all of the Mara Salvatrucha are kids; some of them actually survive into their 30's and 40's and so on. I think the guy playing El Sol gets somewhat overlooked. His character doesn't have Lil' Mago's eerie appearance but he manages to be every bit as scary just the same.

Also, Mr. Fukunaga clearly knows his Shakespeare. Willy has two different relationships that both echo "Romeo and Juliet" and there's a scene at the end that's a modern version of "Et tu, Brute?" from "Julius Caesar". But what I like most about him is his obstinacy. He was given a Sundance Studios green light to make a film and he came up with a Spanish language epic made in Mexico with an all-Hispanic cast. Not a single gringo in sight, but don't let the sub-titles discourage you from experiencing a top-notch, extremely well-made, deeply moving film. Go see it and buy the DVD when it comes out - it's that good.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece, June 4, 2009

By 

Karen Franklin "Forensic Psychologist" (El Cerrito, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Sin Nombre has it all - great acting, beautiful cinematography, powerful themes, and amazing realism. The realism is no accident. Young filmmaker Cary Fukunaga spent months in Mexico, interviewing both immigrants and gang members about their experiences. He shot on location, and many cast members are nonprofessionals. For example, Edgar Flores, in the lead role as a member of the Chiapas chapter of the brutal Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, is straight off the streets of Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Despite the specific setting of the tumultuous U.S.-Mexico border, Sin Nombre addresses powerful and universal themes of damnation and redemption. At least, that's how I saw it. In an interview, Fukunaga himself said he sees it as being about family - "the disintegration and recreation of the family unit in its unique and varying forms."

The plot centers around a chance and fateful encounter between gang member Willy and a 15-year-old Honduran girl, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), who is riding north through Mexico atop a train. Though Sayra's journey, viewers get an appreciation for the intense dangers faced by Central Americans trekking toward the promised land.

Without giving away anything, I can tell you a bit of background on how the film came about. Fukunaga, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, was in film school in New York when he read a New York Times story on a group of Mexican and Central American immigrants who died of asphyxiation and heat exhaustion while trapped and abandoned inside a refrigerated trailer. His short 2004 documentary about that case, "Victoria Para Chino," won multiple film awards.

That project evolved into Sin Nombre, as Fukunaga explained in an IndieWire interview. Doing the research, he said, "I learned about the awful journey Central American immigrants went through in order to get to the United States - crossing the infinitely more dangerous badlands of Mexico on top of (not in) freight trains bound for the US Border. It was like a world that belonged to the old wild west."

Against the advice of friends, Fukunaga gained intimacy with his topic by taking the same harrowing train-top ride that he would film. On his first ride, with 700 Central American immigrants, the train was attacked within three hours:

"We were somewhere in the pitch black regions of the Chiapan country side. In the alcove of the next train car I heard the distinct pops of gunshots, always louder than they seem in the movies, then the screams of immigrants passing the word: 'Pandillas! Pandillas!' (gangsters). Everyone scattered, I could hear them running in past our tanker car. Not having any where to run to, I stayed on.... The next day I talked to two Hondurans who were next to the attack. They told me a Guatemalan immigrant didn't want to give two bandits his money so they shot him and throw him under the train. [Later] I learned the police had found the body of a Guatemalan immigrant, shot and abandoned.... Nothing could have driven home the sensation of fear and impotence than what I had felt first hand with those immigrants."

Fukunaga's willingness and ability to see through the eyes of others probably owes much to his upbringing. Fukunaga is described in an L.A. Times article as "a wandering spirit with a Japanese father, a Swedish mother, a Chicano stepdad and an Argentine stepmom [who] can't be reduced to the sum of his parts, ethnic or otherwise. Growing up, he shuffled from the suburbs to the country to the barrio ('Crips and Bloods, people getting shot') to the East Bay's hillside bourgeois enclaves. His family, he says, always has been a 'conglomeration of individual, sort of displaced people,' recombinations of relatives and step-relatives, blood kin and surrogate kin, parents and what he calls "pseudo-parents" who treated him like a son."

With this background, Fukunaga was able to capture not only the immigrant experience, but the pathos of gang life in Central America and Mexico, with brutality and hopelessness transmitted from generation to generation. Sin Nombre doesn't give the history or context for the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), which at 100,000-strong is widely considered one of the most fastest-growing and dangerous gangs in the world. But you can get that elsewhere on the Web.

In brief, the MS-13 is an outgrowth of the 1980s war in El Salvador, which led to a massive migration of up to two million refugees into the United States. Many settled in the Ramparts area of Los Angeles, where the gang was founded. Strict U.S. immigration policies in more recent years have paradoxically worsened the gang problem, allowing the MS-13 to gain footholds in Central America and Mexico. The MS-13 is known for its vivid tattoos, but some say members are moving away from tattoos because they so brilliantly illuminate gang membership for authorities. A documentary on the MS-13, Hijos de la Guerra (Children of the War), can be previewed at hijosdelaguerra dot com.

Sin Nombre is getting universal acclaim, and richly deserves the directing and cinematography awards it garnered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Memorable Film, March 29, 2011

By 

SUPERMAN "MILES STANDISH" (THE 40 WATT IN ATHENS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sin Nombre (DVD)

Was fortunate to have seen this at the local Indie theater, wow! This movie has a lot of different aspects to it, but the overwhelming theme is this yearning to escape the misery that many people in parts of the world have to endure. This movie gives us an interesting perspective about how someone trying to leave the horrors of Central American is greeted in southern Mexico and then treated in northern Mexico, which was somewhat shocking, but understandable. Great performances, great film.