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SANGRE DE MI SANGRE
Written & directed by Christopher Zalla
Produced by Benjamin Odell & Per Melita
Director of Photography, Igor Martinovic
Edited by Aaron Yanes
Music by Brian Cullman
Released by IFC Films
English & Spanish with English subtitles
USA. 111 min. Not Rated
With Armando Hernandez, Jorge Adrian Espindola, Jesus Ochoa & Paola Mendoza

Here’s a rare find – a film noir about good and evil that doesn’t look to caricatures or hyperbole to make a point. Sangre de Mi Sangre (Blood of My Blood) is a feat of elegant filmmaking whose heart-pumping plot – with top shelf deception and betrayal – leaves no bitter aftertaste of cheap Hollywood thrills.

After his mother’s death, doe-eyed Pedro (Jorge Adrian Espindola) heads north to meet a father who doesn’t know he exists, with only a locket and a letter of introduction to prove their bond. In the back of a tractor trailer shuttling undocumented immigrants from Mexico to New York, the teenager meets Juan (Armando Hernandez), a shifty hooligan who avidly listens to his story, especially when he learns that Pedro’s father is a wealthy restaurant owner who will surely rejoice over his newfound son. As the truck pulls into Brooklyn, Pedro wakes up to find that Juan and his letter have disappeared.

Instead of a kind restaurateur, Juan discovers that the father, Diego (celebrated Mexican actor Jesus Ochoa), is a miserable dishwasher with no interest in acquiring an adolescent child. While Juan tries to squirm into his squalid life (in the hope of robbing the miser of his hidden savings), Pedro is left homeless and helpless only a few blocks away. Without hiding behind grainy footage and artificial gloom, writer/director Christopher Zalla warps Pedro’s New York into a Dickensian nightmare, complete with a callous street urchin named Magda (Paola Mendoza) who sells sex and bric-a-brac and reluctantly takes Pedro under her wing. But the city’s grimy underbelly is no distortion. This is a real New York, which can only be seen from certain streets, at certain levels of desperation.

As his raw deal entangles Pedro in some morally ambiguous behavior, our fallen hero begins to fall out of the good/evil paradigm. No doubt, Pedro is still generally good, Juan generally bad and slithery, Magda and the father generally bitter. But as extreme circumstances force these characters to make uncharacteristic decisions, this crisp piece of entertainment becomes psychologically relevant art, revealing a film with the heart of an indie and the pulse of a thriller. Yana Litovsky
May 16, 2008