Pepe Mogt

The 5 and 10 street crossing, it's boiling-up cars, stories, nights and days, connect the four corners of Tijuana. It is in this intersection where the road trip to Tijuana Nortec's Sounds starts, which leads us to penetrate a tremendously alive city, with special flavor of a well seasoned music. Here, the Nortec encounter with the Agua Caliente band, formed by fellows from Michoacan, Sinaloa and Tijuana, whom hit the metals with urban fruition, appears to take place in the solar plexus of Tijuana. The Nortec sound is presented as a faithful and happy reflection of what is real in the social and musical fabric. Members of the Agua Caliente band teach neighborhood children about the breaths, strings, percussions, singing and dancing. In Tijuana the educational, cultural and artistic projects start from a collective essence, the true secret of the border city.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then Tijuana is where she gave birth and raised her kid. A city that rejects entropy, Tijuana constructs its own rules. Its denizens negotiate the chaos with fierce independence, ingenuity and a gift for improvisation. Frontier Life is a feature-length documentary that explores beyond Tijuana's Sin City heritage, beyond the aura of menace cultivated by the mainstream media, and searches for the heart and identity of a city that is much more than a cantina-strewn throwback to the Old West. This film does not set out to valorize or condemn what it finds. It approaches Tijuana on its own terms, looking at the city not so much in relationship to the U.S., the border, or even other regions in Mexico, but rather from the inside, within its own context.

Nana has to deal with the overbearing family of her boyfriend and overall abuse. When Fili’s parents show up uninvited at Nana’s house, she is soon confronted with the reality that they are settling in and aren’t going anywhere.