Norte, El

Already in 1983 Nava produced this strong indictment against economic inequality and the brutal immigration policy of the US. Two young Maya Indians, brother and sister, live in a village that is massacred by the Guatemalan army. They manage to escape and try their luck in Los Angeles as illegal workers. Life in the affluent “El Norte”, however, is not as wonderful as they had hoped.

Filmed at a time when the US was supporting several dictatorial regimes in Latin America, El norte was partly shot in Mexico (the junta in Guatemala would not allow the film to be made there). Critics have frequently compared the film with “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck”s classic American novel (1939) chronicling the lives of desperate people hoping for a better life. The novel was turned into a film by John Ford in 1940.

El norte has not lost any of its urgency thirty years after the film was originally released. There are some 10 million illegal immigrants living in the US under often appalling conditions. The immigration debate is one of the major issues in the American presidential elections (Trump”s wall).

Gregory Nava (1949) is one of the first directors to have given American Latinos a voice in his films. The success of El norte did not only open doors for Nava in the US; it also paved the way for later Latino filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Nava and his co-screenwriter Anna Thomas were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In 1984 they founded the Independent Spirit Awards, now a prestigious award for independent American films.

Screened on 13 November with an introduction by Barbara Smit (researcher of Americanos and Metropolis). Barbara Smit lived in Nicaragua for 5 years. Together with Stef Biemans she made the VPRO series Americanos, which follows the route migrants take from Guatemala to the United States. She will talk about their experiences making this series based on fragments from Americanos.