Cinema
El Norte
Gregory Nava · 1983
Synopsis
At San Pedro, a Mayan highland village, the army massacres the peasants whom the father of Enrique and Rosa Xuncax was trying to organise, and their mother disappears. The brother and sister flee north, cross Mexico passing themselves off as Mexicans, are turned back once, then cross the border through a rat-infested sewer. In Los Angeles, Enrique finds a place in a restaurant and Rosa a job as a domestic, under the constant threat of the immigration police.
Context
The screenplay brought together Anna Thomas, producer and wife of the director, the director himself and the Guatemalan novelist Arturo Arias; the film was produced with the help of American public television, for eight hundred thousand dollars. It was shot partly in secret in Mexico, Guatemala being then in the hands of the military, in Spanish and in Quiché, with refugee actors many of whom played what they had lived through. Its authors chose to tell everything from the point of view of the colonised, with no English-speaking hero. It was shown at the Telluride festival in 1983 and went on wide release in January 1984.
Who it is for
A long film, in Spanish and Quiché Maya with subtitles. The context of the Guatemalan civil war and the Maya genocide sheds light on the first part of the film.
Prizes and reception
Nominated for the Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1985, it was added to the National Film Registry in the United States in 1995.