Gregory NavaSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

The couple, who studied filmmaking at the University of California at Los Angeles, had earlier collaborated on "The Confessions of Amans, " a tale of a tragic medieval love affair. "El Norte, " a film of "greater immediacy, " according to New York Times critic Vincent Canby, portrays a Guatemalan brother and sister who flee their country and head for the North after their father, a spokesman for land reform, is murdered. Leaving lush but oppressive Guatemala, Enrique and Rosa encounter the poverty of Mexico and the glaring contrast of wealth on the U.S. side of the border. In a scene of the film that Commonweal critic Tom O'Brien claimed "sums up its rare strength, " the characters cross into California by means of a rat-infested sewer tunnel and emerge to a view of San Diego. "The border is unique--the only place in the world where an industrialized first-world nation shares the border with a third-world country, " Nava, who has relatives in Tijuana, told Annette Insdorf of the New York Times. "In California, it's just a fence: on one side are the Tijuana slums, on the other side--San Diego. It's so graphic! This was the germ of the story."

America does not immediately upset the newcomers' expectations of a better life, although they discover that the poverty they had "left behind" in Mexico also exists in California. The pair fares well; a new friend of Rosa's finds her a job as a maid, and Enrique becomes a waiter in a restaurant. Canby remarked, "The real and most poignant point of `El Norte' is ... the ease and eagerness with which, after their initial homesickness, they adapt themselves to the gringo world.... The plastic society enchants them." Several critics noted that "El Norte" critiques America more than Latin America, and considered the film more personal than political. O'Brien, for instance, declared that "there's no propaganda in the movie, just visual poetry, suspense and emotional force."

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