First time director Cary Fukunaga won Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival for this excellent thriller, shot in Mexico, about a young man escaping north from his brutal street gang after a betrayal puts his life in danger; when he meets teenager Sayra traveling with her father on a train loaded with immigrants, they forge a dangerous, short lived spiritual bond. Fukunaga’s film is more of a chase thriller than a political treatise about gang violence and immigration, but there are traces of social consciousness in the way the immigrants risk their lives on top of a packed train at the slightest chance of making it to America, and in the deeply embedded examination of Mexican street gangs, all tattoos and loyalty oaths, an underground way of life is exposed.