7 April 2015 (Series 30:10) Gregory Nava, EL NORTE (1983, 141 minutes)

National Film Preservation Board, National Film Registry, 1995 Directed by Gregory Nava Written by Gregory Nava (story) and Anna Thomas Produced by Trevor Black, Bertha Navarro, Anna Thomas Music by The Folkloristas, Malecio Martinez, Linda O'Brien, and Emil Richards Cinematography by James Glennon Film Editing by Betsy Blankett Milicevic Costume Design by Hilary Wright Art Design by David Wasco and Gregg Barbanell Sound Design by Michael C. Moore and Marshall Winn Ernesto Gómez Cruz ... Arturo David Villalpando ... Enrique Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez ... Rosa Alicia del Lago ... Lupe Mike Gomez ... Informer Jose Martin Ruano ... Foreman Stella Quan ... Josefita Heraclio Zepeda ... Pedro Emilio Gomez Ozuna ... Luis Daniel Lemus Valenzuela ... Encarnacion Rodrigo Puebla ... El Puma the Soldier Yosahandi Navarrete Quan ... Josefita's Daughter Rodolfo De Alexandre ... Ramon Emilio Del Haro ... Truck Driver Jorge Moreno ... Old Man on Bus Palomo Garcia ... Coyote at Bus Station Diane Cary ... Alice Harper Gregory Nava (director, writer) (b. Gregory James Nava, April 10, 1949 in San Diego, California) directed 11 films and television shows, which are 2007 “Making of Selena: 10 Years Later” (Video documentary short), 2006 Bordertown, 2002 American Family (TV Series), 1999 “The 20th Century: American Tapestry” (TV Movie documentary), 1998 Why Do

Fools Fall in Love, 1997 Selena, 1995 My Family, 1988 A Time of Destiny, 1983 El Norte, 1976 The Confessions of Amans, and 1972 The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva (Short). He also wrote 9 films and television shows: 2006 Bordertown, 2002 Frida, 2002 American Family (TV Series), 1997 Selena, 1995 My Family, 1988 A Time of Destiny, 1983 El Norte, 1982 The End of August, and 1976 The Confessions of Amans. James Glennon (cinematographer) (b. James Michael Glennon, August 29, 1942 in Los Angeles, California—d. October 19, 2006 (age 64) in Los Angeles, California) was the cinematographer for 61 films and television shows, among them 2006-2007 “Big Love” (TV Series, 8 episodes), 2004-2006 “Deadwood” (TV Series, 19 episodes), 2005 The Big White, 2005 Madison, 2003 “Carnivàle” (TV Series, 6 episodes), 2003 Good Boy!, 2003 The United States of Leland, 2002 About Schmidt, 2002 Local Boys, 2002 Life Without Dick, 2002 “The

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West Wing” (TV Series), 2001 Viva Las Nowhere, 2000 Playing Mona Lisa, 2000 South of Heaven, West of Hell, 1999 The Runner, 1999 Election, 1997 “Two Voices” (TV Movie), 1997 “L.A. Johns” (TV Movie), 1996 Mojave Moon, 1996 Invader, 1996 “Co-ed Call Girl” (TV Movie), 1996 Citizen Ruth, 1994 Judicial Consent, 1993 “Angel Falls” (TV Series), 1993 “The Disappearance of Nora” (TV Movie), 1992 The Lounge People, 1992 “In the Deep Woods” (TV Movie), 1991 December, 1991 “Murder in New Hampshire: The Pamela Wojas Smart Story” (TV Movie), 1990 A Show of Force, 1988 Lemon Sky, 1986 Flight of the Navigator, 1985 Smooth Talk, 1985 “My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Legend of Errol Flynn” (TV Movie), 1984 Up the Creekz, 1984 “Last of the Great Survivors” (TV Movie), 1983 El Norte, 1981 Prisoners, and 1977 Jaws of Death (Documentary). Betsy Blankett Milicevic (editor) edited 7 films and TV shows: 1997 “Dead by Midnight” (TV Movie), 1988 Riding Fast, 1988 A Time of Destiny, 1985 “The Blue Yonder” (TV Movie), 1983 El Norte, 1981 “The Sophisticated Gents” (TV Movie), and 1979 Penitentiary.

Ernesto Gómez Cruz ... Arturo (b. November 7, 1933 in Veracruz, Veracruz, Mexico) appeared in 178 films and television shows, including 2014 “El Mariachi” (TV Series), 2013 Las Armas del Alba, 2012 “Capadocia” (TV Series, 10 episodes), 2012 The Fifth Commandment, 2010 El Narco, 2010 On Childhood, 2008 Teo's Journey, 2007 El guapo, 2002 El crimen del padre Amaro, 2001 The Mexican, 1999 Herod's Law, 1998 Fraude en el sexenio, 1996 Los vuelcos del corazón, 1994 Tramp, 1993 Santo: The Legend of the Man in the Silver Mask, 1992 Mister barrio, 1991 Highway Patrolman, 1991 Latino Bar, 1990 Sandino, 1987 Zapata en Chinameca, 1985 Dos pistoleros violentos, 1984 Arizona, 1984 The Evil That Men Do, 1983 El Norte, 1983 Eréndira, 1983 El guerrillero del norte, 1982 La combi asesina, 1982 Días de combate, 1982 A Married Woman, 1979 Life Sentence, 1978 Roots of Blood, 1977 The Rattlesnake, 1975 Tívoli, 1975 The One Who Came from Heaven, 1974 La muerte de Pancho Villa, 1972 Tacos al carbón, 1971 No Exit, 1970 Zapata, and 1967 The Outsiders.

David Villalpando ... Enrique (b. January 2, 1959 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico) appeared in 21 films and TV shows, which are 2008 “La rosa de Guadalupe” (TV Series), 2004 “La escuelita VIP” (TV Series, 45 episodes), 2003 “La casa de la risa” (TV Series), 1999 “Acapulco H.E.A.T.” (TV Series), 1998 The Mask of Zorro, 1998 “Cero en conducta” (TV Series), 1997 Dance with the Devil, 1997 Men with Guns, 1997 Por si no te vuelvo a ver, 1996 The Arrival, 1994 La hija del Puma, 1993 “Nurses on the Line: The Crash of Flight 7” (TV Movie), 1992 The Harvest, 1991 Retorno a Aztlán, 1990 “Nazca” (TV Series), 1989 No se asombre sargento (Short), 1989 Goitia, un dios para sí mismo, 1987 The Delos Adventure, 1987 Y yo que la quiero tanto (Short), and 1983 El Norte. Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez ... Rosa (b. November 2, 1959 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico) appeared in 71 films and television shows, among them 2015 “Que te perdone Dios” (TV Series, 37 episodes), 2013-2014 “Qué pobres tan ricos” (TV Series, 167 episodes), 2013 Actores S.A., 2012 “A Shelter for Love” (TV Series, 159 episodes), 2010-2011 “Para volver a amar” (TV Series, 146 episodes), 2010 El Narco, 2008 Enemigos íntimos, 2008 “La rosa de Guadalupe” (TV Series), 2007 Niñas Mal, 2006 “Duel of Passions” (TV Series), 1996-2006 “Mujer, casos de la vida real” (TV Series, 19 episodes), 2003 Zurdo, 2002 Dark Cities, 1996 Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda, 1992 Wild Blue Moon, 1991 Highway Patrolman, 1991 City of the Blind, 1987 Gaby: A True Story, 1986 Firewalker, 1986 Miracles, 1985 Viaje al paraíso, 1983 El Norte, and 1975 La lucha con la pantera. Alicia del Lago ... Lupe (b. January 11, 1935 in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico) appeared in 73 films and television shows, some of which are 2006 “Heridas de amor” (TV Series), 2006 The Girl on the Stone, 2003 “Real Love” (TV Series), 2001 Green Stones, 1997 “Gente bien” (TV Series, 87 episodes), 1997 “Madame le consul” (TV Series), 1996 “Marisol” (TV Series), 1995 La revancha, 1995 My Family, 1992 Gertrudis, 1989 Old Gringo, 1983 El Norte, 1978 The Children of Sanchez, 1978 Cananea, 1977 The Chosen One, 1975 The House in the South, 1975 El valle de los miserables, 1971 Mama Dolores, 1969 Memories of the Future, 1967 The Female Soldier, 1963 The Paper Man, 1959 The Soldiers of Pancho Villa, 1958 Sierra Baron, 1958 The Bravados, 1958 Los salvajes, 1956 The Hidden One, and 1954 Roots.

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Héctor Tobar: “Promised Land: El Norte” (Criterion notes) In the 1980s, with the wounds of the Vietnam War still fresh in the collective American memory, Hollywood took up the themes of empire, democracy, and war. A series of films transported Americans to distant countries and exotic locales where small and bloody conflicts of the cold war were being fought. Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” The focus of U.S. foreign policy had turned to a handful of Latin American countries where right-wing dictators waged war against leftist rebels. In response, filmmakers raided studio wardrobe closets for the uniforms of foreign armies and their gold-braided epaulets; and they lined up Latino actors to play banana republic strongmen and right-wing hit men.

For Salvador (1986), dozens of actors were hired to portray the tortured corpses of El Salvador’s recent history, and Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman paired up to tell a story about the revolution against Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in Under Fire (1983). These films borrowed heavily from the narrative formula mastered decades earlier by British writer Graham Greene. In novels such as The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, and The Comedians, Greene tossed idealistic and cynical Westerners into the absurd theater of third world political conflict and imperial intrigue. Salvador and Under Fire offered up American journalists as protagonists, as did other political thrillers of the era, such as The Year of Living Dangerously and Missing (both 1982).

The authoritarian regimes of the era provided an ample supply of dread, and each film re-created mass arrests, massacres, and forced “disappearances” in chilling detail. The filmmakers’ indignation sprang forth from each screenplay in soliloquies of moral outrage: U.S. politicians and diplomats were taking the side of venal, tin-pot regimes in the name of cold-war victory and tainting the good name of American democracy. “I believed in America. I believed we stood for something,” declares James Woods as Richard Boyle, the antihero of Salvador, written and directed by a Vietnam veteran named Oliver Stone. “I don’t want another Vietnam.” In 1983, filmmaker Gregory Nava, with his writing partner and producer, Anna Thomas, also brought the story of a cold-war battleground to the screen. They shared the moral outrage that marked the works of their brethren working in Hollywood, but their film was made under very different circumstances, and with a very different narrative, if not political, point of view: the independently produced El Norte explicitly rejected the Graham Greene formula and told a story in which politics was secondary to a universal (and ongoing) human drama. Moreover, Nava and Thomas made a courageous decision: they told the story entirely from the point of view of the colonized “natives,” eschewing an English-speaking protagonist.

Guatemala was then suffering through what was arguably the most sanguinary of all the late cold-war conflicts

fought in the Western Hemisphere. Nava filmed much of his movie in Mexico because Guatemala was then ruled by the military dictatorship placed in power by a CIA-orchestrated coup d’état in 1954. In the 1980s, in response to growing militancy among Mayan Indians, the Guatemalan army launched a scorched-earth policy in the country’s Mayan-speaking regions. Entire villages were wiped off the map: it was the closest thing to genocide in Latin America since the Spanish conquest. These acts of rebellion and repression are the backdrop of the events depicted in El Norte, which is the family drama of Enrique and Rosa Xuncax, the earnest brother and sister whose flight from Guatemala’s violence becomes a grand, cross-border epic.

There isn’t a word of English spoken for almost the entire first hour of El Norte. Instead, Nava’s fine ensemble of Mexican, Central American, and U.S. Latino actors speak the K’iche’ Mayan language and Spanish with well-practiced Guatemalan and Mexican idioms and accents. Even the beer served at the table of Rosa and Enrique’s village home is a real Guatemalan brand, as Nava brings to El Norte a unique blend of authenticity and dream realism.

Nava’s dreamlike imagery, though, is grounded by a realistic brutality. The violence that falls upon the family after the act of defiance by Rosa and Enrique’s father, Arturo, rings with truth: tens of thousands of Guatemalan families suffered similar fates. The Guatemalan chapter of the film ends with the arrival of soldiers, and an act of brutality as gruesome as anything in Salvador or Under Fire. But what gives Nava’s remarkable film its lasting power is what happens from that horrific moment onward, as Rosa and Enrique undertake a

journey northward that parallels that canonical American tale of desperate people in flight: The Grapes of Wrath. Like the Joads of Steinbeck’s novel, Rosa and Enrique are headed for California, a place they have come to think of as a promised land. “In the U.S., even the poorest people have toilets,” their godmother tells them. “You flush it, and everything vanishes.”

“In the North, we won’t be treated this way,” Enrique says. “We’ll make a lot of money. We’ll have everything we want . . . We’ll have good luck now. I’m sure of it.” “The North” is his only hope for salvation, and he clings to the faith that the myth might actually be true. But the Xuncaxes soon discover that the road north is a kind of “war” in itself. On the route from the lush mountains of Guatemala to the deserts of northern Mexico, they encounter helpful strangers, smugglers, thieves, and an unrelenting sense of strangeness and threat. Rosa and Enrique pass underneath the U.S. border in an abandoned sewer drain and are attacked by rats, a powerful metaphor for the dehumanization inflicted upon everyone who undertakes such a crossing.

Rosa and Enrique’s first look at California is of the gleaming lights of the San Diego skyline. It’s a modern, urban version of the green fields of abundance the Joads gaze upon after crossing the Mojave in The Grapes of Wrath. Like the Okies and other down-and-out migrants who arrived in

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California before them, Rosa and Enrique will soon discover that California is at once a place of magical reinvention and cruel exploitation. Enrique looks for work at one of the infamous day-laborer sites that dot Los Angeles. He eventually finds a job at an upscale restaurant: when he sheds his scruffy clothes and dons a white busboy’s uniform, he is transformed into a beaming prince. Rosa evades capture in an immigration raid and finds work in an orderly mansion much like one she admired in a Good Housekeeping magazine back in Guatemala. Brother and sister study and quickly master the lingua franca of all ambitious Californians: English.

But the Xuncaxes’ fragile hold on the American dream quickly slips away in the final, tragic half hour of the film. We are left with El Norte’s deeply subversive message: the ligatures that bind us to the suffering and violence of the third world are everywhere to be seen in our daily American lives. We are surrounded by people whose flight from their homes ensures the comfort we enjoy in our homes. Nava’s triumph is that he succeeded in placing the courage and dreams of people like Rosa and Enrique at the center of his story, rather than making them mere extras in the background of an exotic political thriller. And he foresaw what would become a defining fissure in America’s social fabric: the marginalization of millions of Latino immigrants.

Just a few years after the stories of Central America began to reach U.S. movie screens, the Berlin Wall came crashing down and the cold war fizzled to an end. Military men no longer dominate the El Salvador of Oliver Stone’s film or the Chile of Missing or the Guatemala of El Norte. At the same time, the continuing arrival of immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border has grown into a central issue of the American political debate. The perils of the migrant road northward haven’t changed all that much in the quarter century since El Norte’s premiere. The border is officially “militarized” now, and the crossing routes have moved deep into the Arizona desert. For most people, the journey remains as awful and degrading as a long crawl through a rat-filled tunnel.

Nava filmed El Norte, in part, with funding from U.S. public television. Back then, there was no Fox News or powerful anti-immigration lobby to complain about American tax dollars paying for a film sympathetic to the undocumented. And although PBS has continued to put forth inspired works about immigration issues, a “compassion fatigue” toward immigrants has spread generally through American society. Poverty and corruption continue to feed social conflict in Latin America and out-migration to “el Norte.” Cities and towns from Montana to Maine are filled with Rosas and Enriques, and Latino immigration has transformed the cultural fabric of the United States. Today, El Norte endures as the epic chronicle of a journey deeply embedded in the American experience.

Reed Thompson, “Gregory Nava’s film ‘El Norte’ marks 25th anniversary, LA Times, 28 January 2009 When Gregory Nava's "El Norte" opened in U.S. theaters 25 years ago, immigration was less of a political hot-button issue than it is today.

Back then, the mass exodus of refugees from Central American countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala was driven as much by civil war as by economics. California's Proposition 187 in 1994 and the pro-immigration marches of May 2006 still were years away.

But in recent months, until the global economic swoon took center stage, immigration became one of the most pressing and polarizing issues on the national agenda. That gives a

renewed potency to Nava's $750,000 independent movie about a Guatemalan brother and sister's harrowing odyssey to the United States -- including a memorably grueling crawl through a rat-infested tunnel -- and their struggles in adapting to their new life in Los Angeles.

The movie's quality and enduring influence is being acknowledged with this month's release of a 25th anniversary

edition of the film on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection. While Nava says he's tremendously pleased by the recognition and thankful to Criterion, he sees a bittersweet dimension to his movie's stature.

"We made the film not to make a commercial hit but to make a film about the human tragedy of a very tragic situation that still continues to this day," says the writer-director, speaking from his Santa Fe, N.M., home. "I'm very, very gratified that the film is still considered to be so relevant, and it saddens me because the issues are still there."

Criterion's release includes a number of bonus features: an audio commentary featuring Nava; an intriguing documentary about the making of "El Norte"; and a gallery of location-scouting photographs from Chiapas, Mexico.

It also includes Nava's haunting black-and-white student film, "The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva" (1972), which explores the theme of forced exile that Nava would further develop in "El Norte." The award-winning earlier film also provides evidence of the lyrical visual style that Nava would bring fully to bear on "El Norte."

Nava refers to this style as "dream realism," which he characterizes as less "folkloric and cute" than magic realism and more deeply engaged with "tough social problems." He counts Luis Buñuel's 1950 masterpiece, "Los Olvidados," about Mexico City's slum children, and Luchino Visconti's "La Terra Trema" as major inspirations.

Among the filmmakers' crucial and risky decisions for "El Norte" was to shoot much of it in Spanish and indigenous Guatemalan languages as well as English. "We shot in incredibly isolated and difficult locations because we wanted to get that world on the screen," Nava says. "We had a very small crew of people in two Volkswagen vans."

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"We were young, and so we were in a way kind of insane."

"El Norte" came about, in part, through the confluence of two trends in the early 1980s. One was the increasing public attention paid to the effects of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union in places like Latin America and Africa.

As novelist and Times columnist Héctor Tobar points out in an essay in a program booklet accompanying the Criterion release, in the early 1980s Hollywood produced a handful of films examining these conflicts, such as "Missing," "Under Fire" and "Salvador." But their protagonists typically were non-Latinos. "El Norte" broke from this pattern by making the young siblings played by Mexican actors Zaide Silvia Gutierrez and David Villalpando the center of the action.

Another factor in "El Norte's" success was the rise of a new wave of U.S. independent filmmakers. Nava was one of several young independent directors, such as Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles and David Lynch, who, Nava says, felt "there was a need at that time to deal with different sorts of subject matter, different things the Hollywood film was not dealing with."

As Thomas says in the Criterion documentary, "El Norte" was able to attract both the non-Latino "I go to art movies" crowd and the Latino "This is a film about me" crowd.

Throughout his subsequent career, Nava, a San Diego native who has many relatives in Tijuana, has continued to explore aspects of the immigrant experience, in 1995's "Mi Familia," 2006's "Bordertown" and other movies. And he's working on another film, "Gates of Eden," that will update those themes to the present.

"You need a film to help you on a human level to deal with the changes that you're seeing. That's true for Hispanics and for non-Hispanics." Kiko Martinez: “Gregory Nava—El Norte” Cinesnob Growing up between the cities of San Diego, Calif. and Tijuana, México, filmmaker Gregory Nava saw firsthand the immigration issue that existed between the two neighboring countries. He says the passion he had making his 1983 film, “El Norte,” stemmed from his childhood. Crossing the border three times a week became part of his lifestyle.

Considered by many as one of the greatest films about immigration, “El Norte” tells the story of a brother and sister fleeing persecution in their home country of Guatemala and traveling across México to start a new life in Los Angeles.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, “El Norte” was released on Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray late last month. I spoke to Nava about “El Norte,” a movie he considers “more relevant today than when it was made 25 years ago.”

Did you realize when you were making “El Norte” that 25 years later immigration would be such a controversial issue?

I saw [immigration] as part of a pattern. I didn’t think it would ever stop somehow. Now, it has become the greatest migration event of the U.S., even greater than the migration of Europe at the turn of the century. It is something that is changing the lives of everybody in this country and this entire nation.

Do you have faith President Obama can find an answer to immigration reform that will please both sides? ���

The laws that exist today are inadequate to deal with what we are facing. I believe we cannot begin to come to a solution unless we embrace the humanity of the people that have come here to work. They are like shadows that pervade our society. I made “El Norte” to

bring a heart and a soul to those shadows. Until that happens, there will never be any kind of reform that will be meaningful or long-term.

In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled their country because of the destruction taking place… And people of the U.S. were unaware of the impact these wars were having on immigration. [Refugees] who came here said they were from México because they didn’t want to be shipped back to their home countries. The statistics said 98 percent of the people in the U.S. illegally were from México, but that was hardly true. I wanted to shed light on that with “El Norte.”

“El Norte” was the youngest film to be listed in the U.S. National Film Registry in 1995. Why do you think it was so important for the Film Registry to recognize the film so quickly? Some films on that list had to wait over 100 years. “El Norte” waited 12.

I think people felt that it was a groundbreaking film. It was dealing with very important subject matter in a way that had never been done before. It had an epic quality and brought the Latin American dream realist storytelling style that was so familiar in novels. It was giving a voice to the voiceless.

The online PDF files of these handouts have color images

Coming up in the Spring 2015 Buffalo Film Seminars Apr 14 Bryan Singer, The Usual Suspects, 1995 Apr 21 Bela Tarr, Werkmeister Harmonies, 2000

Apr 28 Sylvain Chomet, The Triplets of Belleville, 2003 May 5 Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men, 2007

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