El Camino

Twelve-year-old Saslaya longs to escape from her bleak life in Acahualinca, a rural area of Nicaragua, where she lives with her mute younger brother Dario and her grandfather. Her existence consists of going to school, sifting through trash at the local dump to supplement her family's meager livelihood, and trying to evade her grandfather's incestuous abuse. In the middle of the night, Saslaya and Dario sneak away from their village to find their mother, who left eight years ago to look for work in Costa Rica but has not been heard from since. They band together with other runaways in a nearby city, forming a kind of improvised family. Finding their way to the ocean, they board a boat to Costa Rica with other migrants and continue their search for home and family. Throughout this film, writer and director Ishtar Yasin paints a portrait of the hardships faced by Nicaraguan families torn apart by economic dislocation. Rife with a symbolism that seems to draw as much from the language of painting and photography as it does from the language of cinema, EL CAMINO is a provocative story of a child's stuggle to find home. – L.W.