Directed by the young talent Cary Fukunaga, a winner of the Sundance Film Festival Directing award, the film focuses on a combination of issues in South America, from involvement of kids and teenagers in Mexican gangs to what it takes for those who decide to leave South and Central America and seek greener pastures in the U.S.
The story follows two main characters, Casper and Sayra, played by lesser-known actors Edgar Flores and Paulina Gaitan. While Casper is the member of the feared gang Mara Salvatrucha, his faith connects him with Sayra, a Honduran emigrant that travels with her father and uncle together with the other emigrants on a freight train to the U.S.
On this journey together, as Casper tries to escape his faith and Sayra to meet hers, the main characters are slowly blending together, complete each other through their diversity, while they have to face the rough side of life in today's Mexico.
As a result, the film has a gripping, disturbing, moving sour-sweet blend to it, and is exactly the type of the film where it's unpredictability, natural change of pace, and lots of eye candy in the scenery, makes you part of the story until the credits role, making you beg for more inside.
Fukunaga's film feels so real not only thanks to his time spent in Mexico and his first hand experience with both, emigrants and immigrants he met before and while shooting the film, his cast of actual members of the Mara gang, perfect editing and combination of locations and the effort he took while filming to get the best out of his actors ("apart from beating them", he joked at Vary), makes the film one of the best feature debuts I've ever seen.
