Padre Nuestro

My wife and I saw Padre Nuestro, now called Sangre De Mi Sangre at a special showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and were treated to a question and answer session by the Director/writer, Christopher Zalla. The name of the movie was changed from Padre Nuestro to its new title in Mexico where it had a fairly wide distribution to avoid confusion with an earlier light weight comedy made in Chile with the same title. This movie is anything but light weight as it revolves around the gritty life experiences of illegal aliens struggling to survive in the United States in a dog eat dog world.

This movie contains wonderful performances from each of its four principal characters and Jesus Ochoa (Diego), who is the most well recognized of the Mexican cast, fills the screen with a performance as large as his girth. Armando Hernandez (Juan) deserves mention for an equally powerful performance with only a slightly lesser efforts from Jorge Adrian Espindola (Pedro) and Paola Mendoza (Magda, which certainly did not detract from the excellence of this film.

Filmed on location in a gritty industrial section of Brooklyn, the story contains a sense of believability with only a modest level of contrivance necessary to develop a credible, seamless story line. A powerful movie, which measured up to its success at the Sundance film festival in 1987. The movie will have a limited release in the United States at a single theatre in five city's during the month of May, 2008, so it may not be widely seen, which would be a shame. I look forward to seeing Christopher's next film which we are told will be set in a Bolivian prison for Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and which may star Don Cheadle.

Mr. Zalla is a very good director, he gets wonderful performances from the actors and demonstrates a great sense of visual composition. However the writing is sloppy at best, the story does not hold water, is filled with inconsistencies and maintains a gruesome, almost sordid tone to a movie that could have said just as much about the condition of immigrants without stripping them of their humanity. That the characters are flawed is expected, but must they all be beyond hope of redemption? A day after seeing this movie, I am still making lists of all the details that did not add up or were entirely too coincidental for such an otherwise "realistic" movie. The soundtrack by Brian Cullman is excellent. One wishes there was more of it.

SANGRE DE MI SANGRE (also known as PADRE NUESTRO) is a fast-paced, raw, and rather brutal indictment against the cruelty immigrants face upon entering this country. Written and directed by Christopher Zalla the film may cover territory becoming a bit overexposed in cinema of late, but the story is so well told and acted that it rises to the top of the films currently available about the experiences immigrants (from Mexico, in this case) endure in trying to better their lives under the torch of the Statue of Liberty!

The film opens in Mexico where a young criminal Juan (Armando Hernández) narrowly escapes his pursuers by jumping over the border fence and landing in a situation where a coyote (corrupt border guard) is loading his truck with immigrants to transport them for cash to New York. The street-wise Juan is one of many stuffed into a truck and happens to sit by a young illiterate lad his age named Pedro (Jorge Adrián Espíndola) who is on his way to meet his father who lives in New York ('a man who owns a restaurant') but whom Pedro has never seen (he carries with him a letter to his father from his recently deceased mother). Through all manner of staging errors and transportation glitches, the two young boys, full of dreams of a better future in America, land in New York. Juan loses his money and his ID and steels from his newfound friend. Pedro encounters a streetwalker named Magda (Paola Mendoza) who promises to help Pedro find his father Diego (Jesús Ochoa). But Jaun has found the dishwasher Diego first, claims to be his son, and causes confusion and discord in Diego's life. How the two lads manage to survive the complexities of life in Brooklyn and are swept up in the raw life of crime that surrounds the lives of illegal immigrants makes for a complicated story, but one filled with unforgettable characters and emotions.

This film had an unfortunately brief run in the theaters. It is a well-made film in every aspect and deserves wider audience which now, on DVD , it just may reach. Highly recommended. Grady Harp

This may not be a great film, but it is a very good one. It's about two young men from Mexico who enter the US illegally and wind up in New York. It is in the convention of film noir, that is the characters, under the pressure of hard times their own weaknesses and their need to survive, are doomed from the start. Other reviews here have suggested that the plot is too contrived and unbelievable, but this is a feature of film noir, fate intervenes to frustrate the good impulses of the characters and accentuates the bad. I found the drama compelling and the characters believable. There is no moral here, no uplifting commentary; fate has them in its clutches and as in Greek drama the characters appear to have free will but are really caught up in the inevitable downward spiral.

I will not give away any of the plot twists but this film kept me guessing. Nothing was predictable or commonplace. There was no overt message about the plight of immigrants except the movie conveys a powerful impression of what it must feel like to be an illegal immigrant in a big city without money, friends or support. But the movie isn't a political tract, it is a gripping drama meant to entertain, not instruct. It is very like a lot of the 'B' movies of the 40s and 50s, products of entertainment which become art in themselves. On the other hand it reminded me a lot of "The Bicycle Thief" by Vittorio de Sica.

The acting is unbelievable, almost as unbelievable as the plot. The movie advances its plot on coincidences and is not what I expected.

The director seemed to look for a convoluted plot to appear smart and gritty, but at the same time, one of the characters is so extremely naive. The message given at the end of the movie is that being cunning outweighs good intention, yet I wonder how did the good character was able to advance so far in a city such as New York.

Overall the plot ends taking everything down that the acting brings forward. Jesus Ochoa is a step above all the actors in this movie, and did as good as possible as his character let him do.