Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009)

In Mexico, two boys got through a violent initiation rite into a gang. Meanwhile, a family leaves their home in Honduras to head for the U.S. border and an imagined better life.
Fukunaga's film doesn't bring anything new per se to the ever-growing illegal immigration quasi-documentary genre, but it is unflinching in its expose of fragile hopes in the face of the characters' brutal reality, and this includes a refusal to romanticise the subject. There's scant soundtrack or dramatisation because there's no poetry in being downtrodden, Fukunaga seems to want to drill home. Not a radical refrain, then, but still a potent one and effectively delivered.

6/10