Sin Nombre

Sin Nombre took this year's Sundance festival by storm where it won two awards including the Best Director prize and its easy to see why.

From the studio that created films like Traffic, 21 Grams and The Motorcyle Diaries, and executively produced by Gael Garcia Bernal, Sin Nombre or 'without a name', is a thriller about a young girl Sayra (Gaitan) and her relatives from Honduras who are hoping to find their way through South America to cross the border into the United States in the hope of a better life.

At the same time, the film tracks the workings of the vicious street gang, the Mara Salvatrucha in Mexico where young man Casper (Flores) is trying to fulfil obligations as a gang member but at the same time keep his girlfriend Martha Marlene (Diana Garcia) away from the Mara, for her own safety. When she comes closer to the gang, he and gang leader Lil' Mago (Mejia) fall out and the fight between them will not only have big ramifications for Casper, but also for Honduran girl Sayra as the two plots become horribly linked.

Sin Nombre is primarily a romantic tale showing how Sayra and Casper find they have something, even though they come from different walks of life and find themselves in fateful circumstances. As Casper finds he has a price on his head for reasons I'm careful not to go into, he tries to distance himself from a girl who admires him, merely because he doesn't want her to end up suffering the same fate.

Sin Nombre as a hard-as-nails study of gang loyalty and betrayal, a tale of romantic longing and sacrifice, and a realistic focus on the plight of many impoverished migrants crossing South America, is excellent on many levels.

The performances of Paulina Gaitan and Edgar Flores stand out as does the steely direction of Cary Fukunaga. If the film has a weakness, its merely whether you can believe that the Mara gang would have so many friends in other gangs and whether you can believe that Sayra would wish to make such a torturous journey to the so-called promised land of America, but once the film's stories take hold, you can easily get engrossed in a gripping tale that seemingly can only have one outcome. The ending though still surprises and the writer/director gives little away, leaving you suitably stirred by the end. Well worth it.