Recap Northless at Starz Denver Film Festival

As dawn breaks during the opening credits of Northless, the film follows protagonist Andrés Garcia through a series of understated scenes en route to the U.S. border: Andrés hitchhiking. Andrés waiting for a man in a taqueria. “You the one from Oaxaca?” the man asks. “Si,” he says. A phone call is made. Cut to Andrés in the sweltering desert with a nameless coyote. Cue nightfall. Cue dawn. The coyote’s gone, along with the fee Andrés paid him for safe passage. What other directors might milk for an entire film, director Rigoberto Pérezcano crams into the first third in an act of admirable restraint.

The real story begins when Andrés is spat back out into Tijuana after being processed by an indifferent border patrol. While plotting his next attempt, he finds work in a general store owned by a middle-aged woman and her younger assistant. Both women have been left behind by husbands who headed north, promising to send for them once they were settled. So they wait, the reality of their abandonment setting in deeper every day, with every glance at the border wall that is literally outside the store. In Andrés they find a surrogate, and though they try to convince him to stay, in the end, they know they cannot stop him from making one more push north. The final image of the film is both funny and heartbreaking, hopeful and hopeless, and sure to grace the video screens of countless high-school Spanish classes—provided the film gets decent distribution.     

Northless swept the films-in-progress competition at the San Sebastian film festival in 2008, garnering Pérezcano the funds necessary to turn it into a full-length feature. In finding an original take on an already heavily explored topic, Pérezcano shows it was money well spent. But how widely it is screened remains to be seen. The film earned rave reviews at the Toronto Film Festival, and if it snags the Starz People’s Choice Award here, that could be the shiny accolade the film needs to get a boost. But as the film's message reiterates: Anything is worth a try.