El Norte (film)
| El Norte | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Gregory Nava |
| Produced by | Anna Thomas |
| Screenplay by | Gregory Nava Anna Thomas |
| Story by | Gregory Nava |
| Starring |
Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez David Villalpando |
| Music by | The Folkloristas Malecio Martinez Linda O'Brien Emil Richards |
| Cinematography | James Glennon |
| Edited by | Betsy Blankett Milicevic |
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Production
company |
American Playhouse
Channel Four Films Independent Productions Island Alive Public Broadcasting Service |
| Distributed by | Cinecom International PBS |
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Release date
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Running time
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139 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom United States |
| Language | English Quiché Spanish |
| Budget | $800,000 |
El Norte is a 1983 British-American low-budget independent drama film, directed by Gregory Nava. The screenplay was written by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, based on Nava's story. The movie was first presented at the Telluride Film Festival in 1983, and its wide release was in January 1984.
The picture was partly funded by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a non-profit public broadcasting television service in the United States.
El Norte received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay in 1985, the first American independent film to be so honored. In 1995, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The drama features Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez and David Villalpando, in their first film roles, as two indigenous youths who flee Guatemala in the early 1980s due to the ethnic and political persecution of the Guatemalan Civil War. They head north and travel through Mexico to the United States, arriving in Los Angeles, California, after an arduous journey.
The writing team of Nava and Thomas split the story into three parts:
Arturo Xuncax: The first part takes place in a small rural Guatemalan village called San Pedro and introduces the Xuncax family, a group of indigenous Mayans. Arturo is a coffee picker and his wife a homemaker. Arturo explains to his son, Enrique, his world view and how the indio fares in Guatemalan life, noting that, "to the rich, the peasant is just a pair of strong arms". Arturo and his family then discuss the possibility of going to the United States where "all the people, even the poor, own their own cars". Because of his attempts to form a labor union among the workers, Arturo and the other organizers are attacked and murdered by government troops when a co-worker is bribed to betray them—Arturo's severed head is seen hanging from a tree. When Enrique attempts to climb the tree that displays his father's head, a soldier attacks him. Enrique fights and kills the attacker, only to learn that many of their fellow villagers have been rounded up by soldiers. The children's mother too "disappears": abducted by soldiers. So, using money given to them by their godmother, Enrique and his sister Rosa decide to flee Guatemala, the land of their birth, and head north.
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