I finally think I have my motivation back. Having not reviewed two very good films in Tomboy (on Prime) and The Burial of Kojo (on Netflix), I’m kind of relying on momentum to get me through this review of a pretty harrowing experience.

Focusing on the American/Mexican humanitarian crisis, the golden dream looks at three young Guatemalans Juan, Sara and Samuel going from Guatemala through Mexico all the way up to the USA. Juan wants to be the tough kid with the plan, the leader as it were. Sara has to hide her gender for her own safety and Samuel is rather chilled out but gets by in Guatemala by savenging rubbish heaps. Early on they meet Chauk, a young Indian who can’t speak Spanish, but understands their quest as well as they do. We start off relatively calmly as the director Diego Quemada-Diaz establishes these characters and their relationships. Juan doesn’t trust Chauk and feels animosity towards him as he’s been building up a friendship with Sara. At this point we don’t know whether Chauk knows Sarah is a woman.

However, the film soon becomes darker. They mainly stay on trains to go north, but these can be stopped by immigration guards and gangsters who ruthlessly try to take everything from them. The whole film has Capernaum vibes but is spiritually rather similar to Snowpiercer. You can never quite rest as you know something bad is going to happen and it does get dark. Arguably the darkest part is the when bad things happen, they’re almost treated with a nonchelance. If someone ends up off the track, we don’t stop, we keep going along the tracks no matter what. If somebody is lost, we won’t suddenly go to an action adventure where they’re tracked down. They’re just lost and you don’t hear from them again. These young people don’t have a chance to mourn, they need to focus. Quemada shows this humanitarian crisis for what it is.

The use of light and sound is brilliant. When scenes use bright colours to turn from a neutral to a hot with increasing use of sounds, you feel something is going to happen. It has a similar feel to Do The Right Thing.

We also see the train move towards us in almost every shot. We are in the north and begging the characters to walk to us. Each decision they make is walk north along the tracks in our direction or go a different way in the same way as in Snowpiercer, they have to go to the front of the train. They can turn back, but they believe that moving on will give them the best life in Las Vegas.

The acting is brilliant. It’s full of humanity. The cold moments are dark and sad. Sometimes its the silence which really hurts instead of what they say. The warm and uplifting moments are also exactly that. They are in enough so that the darker moments hurt much more than they otherwise would have. The whole scale is also great. It’s not just these four. When they are sat on trains, the trains are full. Their story is clearly one of many same stories throughout.

Summary

Dark and harrowing, the acceptance in these young peoples reactions to horrifying circumstances show what a crisis is happening. They brilliantly build a window with fantastic lead characters meaning you also feel the darkness. [Grade: B+]