The Sundance Film Festival is at a crossroads. Within the next year, the organization may announce a new home, leaving behind the Park City vistas filmmakers have been flocking to for generations. Yet, in looking back at its storied history for this year’s From the Collection section, the festival selected one of its first distinguished alums, the film “El Norte,” to play the historic Egyptian Theater on snowy Main Street. The film, which received a pristine restoration in 2017 from the Academy Film Archive looked like a great American epic on the theater’s famous screen.
The movie directed and co-written by Gregory Nava has deep roots in Sundance history. He developed “El Norte” at the Institute’s first-ever Director’s Lab in 1981. Two years later, it became the first lab-supported film to be produced, making its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in 1983, and blazing a trail through other high profile film landmarks including screening at the Cannes Film Festival and earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Nava and his co-writer Anna Thomas. At the time, it was rare for an independently produced feature to make such waves, but Nava’s moving portrait of a brother and sister who leave their war-torn home in Guatemala for a chance at the American Dream has proved all-too-relevant. Forty years after its release, Nava told the audience at his Sundance screening, “Today, sadly, there is a crisis on our Southern border, and the message of ‘El Norte’–of humanity and compassion–is needed more today than when we made the film 40 years ago. The story of Rosa and Enrique is the story of all the refugees at the border today.”
At the Sundance screening, “El Norte” still shocked and moved its audience, many of which were watching the film for the first time. The story follows Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) and her brother Enrique (David Villalpando) as their ancestral home in Guatemala is destroyed by guerilla soldiers, a faction of which murder their father and kidnap their mother. They flee for their lives across dangerous roads, rat-infested sewers, and treacherous border towns to the city of Los Angeles, which brings with it a new set of challenges.
Nava shared some of the movie’s immediate impact on release in his introduction before the film, “It had the direct effect of the United States granting protective status to refugees from Central America, not only giving the legal status to Mayan people who worked with us making the film, but also thousands of refugees from Central America,” he said. “This is my proudest achievement as a filmmaker.”
“I was a young filmmaker from the border, full of passion, telling the story of refugees who come to the United States,” Nava said. “I wanted to give them a heart and soul. They were like shadows surrounded by fear and hate. Robert Redford and Michelle Satter, and the people at Sundance helped me formulate this script together to make this plea. We made this film for very little money, five people in a Volkswagen van. We shot in 100 locations from the border to Guatemala to Chiapas, throughout Mexico to Tijuana and the sweatshops of Los Angeles. We were almost killed making this film. It was very dangerous, but we got it made. And when it premiered in theaters, it set box office records for an independent film playing over a year in theaters in New York and Los Angeles.”
After the screening and a standing ovation, Nava reunited with the stars of “El Norte,” Villalpando and Silvia Gutiérrez, and the subject of his next film, Dolores Huerta, for a discussion. “When you’re young, you’re full of dreams and you believe anything is possible,” he told the audience. When I said I wanted to be a filmmaker, so many people told me, forget it. There’s no Latinos in the film business. But I remembered I was so inspired by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez and everything that they accomplished. They really brought an identity to us. Her immortal phrase–‘Si, se puede,’ ‘Yes, you can’–was more than just helping farm workers, but it was helping all of us to realize our dreams. I was so inspired by Dolores, and I went for it.”
Dolores reflected on the film later in the discussion, “It is so crucial, and I think all of us that are here today watching ‘El Norte,’ we’re living the life of the immigrants that are coming to the United States and why they’re coming. The corporate violence that took place in Guatemala during that period of time was trying to get their mineral resources and take their land. Now in addition to those people that are exploiting and terrorizing the people of Central America, they have narcos and climate change.”
“We see all of these people that we’re trying to keep out of the United States, and actually these are the people that we need in the United States,” said Huerta. “[We need] to remind the United States of America, these are the indigenous people – the North American continent and the South American continent, this is their land, okay? This is their land.”
Actress Silvia Gutiérrez reunited with her costar Villalpando and reminisced on their time together, including how Nava helped the Mexican actors learn the traditions and dialect of the Guatemalan characters they were bringing to life on screen. She also reflected on their character’s experiences of leaving home, “If you think about what you feel when you lose that comfort and that way of daily life, it’s always a shock. We were going into ourselves to find those experiences, of course not as harsh and difficult as for Rosa and Enrique, but we could understand, and we were very careful to treat them as human beings with dignity and pride and being willing to do whatever it took to be alive.”
Nava said it was important to him to tell the immigration story in its entirety. “Most immigration stories start with the people coming to the United States,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it that way. I wanted to show the world they come from. That was very important to me for this particular story.”
“I wanted to tell Latino stories in our own Latino way,” said Nava of his approach to the story. “I didn’t want to imitate anybody. I really studied this literature and the mythology and I believe in mythology and mythic structure and mythic images. In Mayan mythology, there are always twin heroes in all pre-columbian mythology. It’s twin heroes, not single heroes, always twins. I thought, alright, we will have twin protagonists. That was very unusual at the time. We had a lot of discussions about that at the Sundance Lab. Whose story is it, Rosa or Enrique’s? I would say it’s Rosa and Enrique equally. But the other aspect of bringing that twin hero concept to the movie was also to have a man and a woman because a man’s experience coming to El Norte and a woman’s experience are very different.”
Villalpando shared his personal connection to the story of “El Norte.” “[When] I started to prepare for this, it wasn’t so far for me because my family’s from Michoacán, and they came to El Norte. My father did it when I was a kid, so I never saw him again. He was lost in El Norte. My mother used to say, your father is in El Norte and he lost. And that’s right, he lost his family.”
“I am so stunned because the film is still relevant at this very moment,” said Villalpando. “And the sad thing is that the issue is still there and it is getting worse and worse every day because the new administration here in America and at this very moment, thousands of people, of workers, of strong “brazos” (a word Enrique embraces when he is in the U.S.) are being deported to Mexico, to Central America, and their families are being divided.”
To close out the conversation, Nava looks towards the future for his upcoming film with the 94-year-old activist Huerta. “It’s going to be an epic film because it’s an epic life,” he said. “I think it’s a very important question for all filmmakers to ask, when they start the journey of their film, what do you want the film to be about? That’s the seed that everything grows from. I said, okay, we’re going to start this journey together. What do you want this film to be about? And Dolores said to me, ‘I don’t want it to be about me. I want this film to inspire a new generation of organizers and activists.’”