Sin Nombre (15)

That Cary Fukunaga's directorial debut, Sin Nombre, was honoured with two prizes at this year's Sundance festival will come as no surprise to those familiar with last year's Grand Jury Prize winner, Frozen River. Though continents apart, both debut features use their own form of social realist narrative to explore two otherwise disparate lives brought together by illegal border crossing.

Here the focus is on two Central American immigrants travelling through Mexico on their way to the U.S. border: Sayra (Gaitan), a teenage girl from Honduras, and Casper (Flores), a member of the notorious Mexican Mara Salvatrucha gang. After Casper slays Mara leader Lil' Mago (Tenoch Huerta) in a spontaneous revenge killing that saves Sayra from the threat of rape, their lives are thrown together aboard the roof of a North American-bound freight train on its journey through the Mexican countryside. Meanwhile, Casper's twelve-year-old Mara protégé, Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer), turns his back on his mentor with a vow to avenge Lil' Mago's death.

Intermittently evocative of Meirelles' City of God and the vicious dog fights of Iñárritu's Amores Perros, the brutal violence of Sin Nombre sets up a hyper-masculinised milieu in which conflict, fraternity and honour offer affirmation to men who have been disempowered by poverty, and where female bodies provide the fragile terrain on which to mark out agency and control. In doing so the film depicts a Central America so bound by gender antiquities and dead ends that the imagined land of plenty is implicitly figured not merely as a place of financial opportunity, but as a beacon of political progressiveness and gender freedoms. Such polarisation between the characters' old and new worlds, though offering fertile ground for the narrative's dramatic conflict, is a worrying reduction of a cultural dialectic that merits greater complexity and texture.

Catapulted by some powerful and challenging themes - poverty can be castrating; violence, gendered and agency, denied - ultimately the film proves frustratingly impotent in its efforts to interrogate them. Indeed, despite the colour of authenticity afforded by the casting of real Mara gang members, the warm glow of the accomplished cinematography deservedly celebrated by one of the film's Sundance wins and the early flashes of tragic inevitability, Sin Nombre offers parsimonious food for thought. There is plenty of polish here, but little new light shed.