To win, it had better be foreign

Two years in a row? It must be a trend. Sundance has awarded its grand jury prize to a US-made Spanish-language film again this year, after last year's crowd-pleasing "Quinceañera." This year, it's "Padre Nuestro," a thriller about a pair of young Mexican immigrants in New York. The film stars Jesus Ochoa (above) as Diego, the estranged father of one of the two boys. The film's irony is built on this bear of a man not knowing which one of the boys may be his.

Ochoa is a prolific, prizewinning, full-fledged star in his native Mexico -- and totally unknown here, as are some of his co-stars, including the celebrated clown Eugenio Derbez, who plays one of the kitchen staff at an anonymous New York restaurant where Diego has stolidly washed dishes for years. Paola Mendoza, a Colombian-born New Yorker, plays Magda, a drifter swept up in the plot by the whatever-it-takes attitudes of foreigners literally kicked out of the beds of tractor trailers onto the streets of Brooklyn.

The director, Christopher Zalla, describes his film set as looking like the United Nations. "My childhood was one of constant movement," he says.

I was born in Kenya after my parents moved to East Africa to study its burgeoning socialist movement. They divorced, and over the next 18 years I was shuttled back-and-forth between them to wherever in the world their lives lead us. I lived in Africa, Europe, and South America, where I stayed for several years with extended family in Bolivia. When those 18 years were over I could speak three languages (I’ve forgotten one), I’d gone to 13 different schools, I’d lived in 21 different homes; and with each new encounter I found myself keenly aware of the existence of borders – spatial, cultural, and personal. I was always a foreigner in the foreign land. And then I came to New York, where everyone is a foreigner on some level. It’s my first real home.

This experience of movement and longing --as well as some solid Catholic morality of the much more cruel Old Testament variety-- is what gets translated to the wayward characters of a compellingly narrated film: immigrants more in search of family than economy, negotiating borderlands where the rights and wrongs of civility don't necessarily stand. But there are neither saints nor angels in this Our Father -- only a dark palette from director of photography Igor Martinovic and a remarkably de-glamourized Manhattan skyline, somewhere over some fences and across a river or two: not much closer, it seems, than it was back in Mexico.

Like its cousin, Maria Full of Grace, this isn't a movie about the American Dream. Diego hasn't bought in to the immigrant story because he hasn't had anything, or anyone, to buy into it for. As he starts delicately sewing artificial roses in his dilapidated hovel somewhere in ill-lit Brooklyn, one of the boys looks on with the universal teenage sneer.

"What do you get for each of those?" he asks.
"Cincuenta centavos."
"Fifty cents a piece? That's all? Pinche sueño Americano."

The film is well made, carefully shot and thoughtfully put together, but it's how the immigration experience is made universal that won over the jury in Park City. The way "Padre Nuestro" dashes headlong into the foreign all around us, and asks who among us are strangers.