El Norte (1983) with Gregory Nava
Saturday, 7:00 pm, Regal Downtown #4
Director: Gregory Nava
Writers: Gregory Nava, Anna Thomas
Cinematographer: James Glennon
Cast: Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez, David Villalpando, Ernesto Gómez Cruz
Running Time: 139 min
In Hollywood, it is nearly impossible to make a movie about an ethnic culture unless you have a white protagonist. Foreigners tend be seen through one narrow lens. So, when Gregory Nava set out to direct El Norte, the story of two Mayan youths who flee Guatemala in the 1980s, he understood that he must work outside of the mainstream. For years, he hustled to get the funding to shoot 35mm footage on location in Latin America—defying traditional Hollywood structures as well as the Mexican secret police, who several times attempted to shut down production. But the effort paid off. El Norte received rave reviews and, in 1985, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Screenplay. It was the first independent film to be so honored.
Nava, who is of Mexican and Basque descent, co-wrote the film with his wife, Anna Thomas. The two met in film school at UCLA and collaborated on a number of projects throughout their marriage.
While the film addresses many weighty issues—in particular, the ongoing persecution of indigenous groups of Latin America—the filmmakers insist that the central message is not political, but humanist. In shooting El Norte, Nava and Thomas decided to combine realism with mystical elements of Mayan culture—à la Gabriel García Márquez—rather than shoot the film as documentary. It was all the better to capture their subject matter, Thomas explained in an interview with the New York Times. “Any issue would be better served by an involving and dramatic story than a lecture: Nobody goes to movies to hear a lecture.”
On Sunday morning, director Nava will conduct the annual Regal Shot-by-Shot Workshop, analyzing selected sequences from the film in depth.
