The Precocious and Brief Life of Sabina Rivas

In a town on Mexico's southern border facing Guatemala, Sabina works in a bar. She is sixteen and came from Honduras. In the same town are people smuggling, human trafficking, an immigration officer and a gang leader. Jovany, her childhood friend, comes back on the train that goes north. The subject is not the border but transit as an industry. Everyone in the town makes money from migration: the bars, the bus drivers, the officials and the gangs, and nobody tries to stop it because stopping it cuts the income. The form is hard and direct; the violence is not dressed up and most of it was shot in real locations. The source is a novel by Aristeo Molinero. The train at the centre of the story is the freight train migrants from Central America ride north, and the casualties of that journey are a documented fact. Luis Mandoki directs, returning to Mexican social subjects after working in Hollywood. Greisy Mena plays Sabina and Joaquín Cosío the man on the gang side. Who it is for: viewers who like Latin American migration stories and hard social drama. Who it is not for: anyone avoiding scenes of violence and abuse; the film does not pull back in them at all.