It’s hard to believe that “Sin Nombre” is director Cary Fukunaga’s first feature, as he has created a haunting, serious film about immigration that is both beautifully shot and frighteningly accurate.
    “Sin Nombre” — as much about escaping one’s identity as it is about escaping one’s country — needs a fresh-faced young director to take on its strong themes, burdened as they are with real-time discussions about immigration. Mr. Fukunaga’s take far surpasses this year’s earlier disaster of an immigration movie, “Crossing Over,” starring Harrison Ford.
    And that’s probably where Mr. Fukunaga made his first smart move: casting relatively unknown Hispanic actors and filming completely in Spanish. The story is so real we can taste it, along with the dust and grime that rolls off the tracks of the train traveling through Mexico to “El Norte” — the United States — with hundreds of immigrants clinging to its back. 

   Nearly all of the characters in the film are escaping either a failed life or an empty one — except those who have nothing left to lose, and thus nothing left to gain, like the leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha, a gang that originally formed in Los Angeles as a way of protecting Honduran immigrants. Here, the gang functions on its native turf, drawing a bloody line of vengeance around its borders and treating disloyal gang members with the same violent methods as it does its enemies.

    Teenage gang member Willy, or “El Casper” (Edgar Flores), is one of the gang’s warier members, accustomed to the life of the group, but not yet completely hardened to the effects of  its violence when they touch his own life. Yet, he still introduces a young boy, “El Smiley,” to the gang, mentoring him and watching as he grows to accept and embrace the gang’s cruel mode of operation.

   As these scenes of gang rituals and gratuitous violence play out, another story unfolds: that of Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and her father and uncle, who are leaving Honduras to journey to New Jersey, where Sayra’s father (Gerardo Taracena) has another family he left behind when he was deported.

   Either of these stories — life in a gang or the journey to the U.S. — could function individually, but in weaving them together, Mr. Fukunaga invokes the full power of what it means to be “sin nombre” (meaning nameless), whether as one of the millions of immigrants scrambling to reach America or as a faceless member of a group where your identity is completely unvalued — until you betray someone within the group. Ultimately, although these two stories have completely different causes and histories, it is the search for identity that unites the narratives, a theme that Mr. Fukunaga develops organically and without a heavy hand. Along the way, he captures some magnificent frames, invoking a savage nature of both the country and its people. He has a way of panning across a large group of people in order to show their mutual desperation, and, in the next shot, zooming in with an intruding familiarity that is unsettling.

   This technique makes for some truly searing shots while transmitting the putrid stench of despondency. There is some terrifying filmmaking at work here, framed by violence and, above all, truth. A similar journey of fear and intimidation transpires every day south of our borders, as Mr. Fukunaga learned when he spent several weeks actually riding the rails with illegal immigrants while researching the movie.

   As a result, the film is shot in present-day, yet the cinematography and the brutal primitiveness of many of the characters’ actions harken back to the old Western films — or so we would like to believe, in order to file away the despicable acts of violence as belonging to a bygone era.

   But as the characters’ modern-day clothing and government immigration files attest, this is a topic very much grounded in current politics, and the narrative becomes much more poignant as it questions who has the right to seek a new life and new opportunity and who doesn’t. Certainly, we watch El Smiley struggle with the chance to turn toward redemption or to sink into the comfortable territories of the gang he admires — and which is so essential to his safety as he grows older. And the developing relationship between Sayra and Willy, set as it is against the backdrop of terror and violence, also questions who deserves a new life, with varying outcomes.

    But ultimately, this is a film about barriers and making choices and sacrifices. There is no sitting on the razor-wire fence that delineates the border: The fences are drawn, and one has to choose between the old life or taking a chance on the new. At the end of the day, if you’re not in God’s hands, then you’re in the devil’s, because somebody has to pay the fare to cross over.

Lindsay Warner can be reached at calendar@thebulletin.us.