Watch El Norte
- R
- 1983
- 2 hr 19 min
-
7.7 (5,590)
This film that displays the need for a family to have more equality and wanting to over come the unbalance scale of prosperity within society. The film starts of with the Xuncax family who are poor working class citizens in a village in Guatemala. Arturo works in the coffee fields and he tries to justify there poverty status stating to his son , Enrique that a family born with nothing is all that they will be in the eyes of the wealthy.
The prospect of coming to the United States for a better life and opportunity have become a dream for the family. However Arturo tries to find equality in his own country and within his own working conditions and with fellow coworkers tries to attempt to form a union.
Arturo's concept is not welcomed from the government and he and his followers are murdered. Enrique is outrage and kills a solider, and mysteriously his mother has vanished. Enrique and his sister leave Guatemala and escape into Mexico and they are helped to cross the border into the United States. The pair realize that life in the Unites States is not as easy as they thought but much better than what they left. They both work minimal jobs making ends meet.
They both have to be cautious not to get caught by immigrations in a fear of being found out. A businesswoman approached Arturo with a proposition, but he has to be by Rosa's bedside who is dying from typhus. On her death bed she proclaims to her brother that they have always been running from poverty and even in the United States they were not treated equally.
Rosa questions if they will ever find the real home that they are in search of. Rosa dies and Arturo tries to go on as best as he could working low wage jobs, but in the end he is reminded of his sister's disappointed reality of a better life.
At the end of the film there is a hanging head some would suggest that Arturo committed suicide.
El Norte is a 1983 adventure movie with a runtime of 2 hours and 19 minutes. It has received mostly positive reviews from critics and viewers, who have given it an IMDb score of 7.7 and a MetaScore of 75.