The famous murals of Diego Rivera show Mexico as a perfect kind of society, a place that makes up in civility and co-operation what it lacks in milk and honey. They are florid social fantasies, where the people — ah, The People — march in the same direction, fully in tune with one another and the sound of destiny. To see where that fantasy ended up in the 21st century one must watch a new kind of masterpiece, the film Sin Nombre.

A pretty and likeable teenager from Honduras, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), meets a father she has not seen in many years. He now lives in the United States with his new family, and returns to see the folks back home. Though his status is illegal, his life seems blessed, as all American lives do, and she decides to cross into Mexico with him and make the dangerous journey north.

She will not understand how dangerous until it is too late. Meanwhile, Caspar (Edgar Flores), a young man who is not as tough as his friends, is hanging out in Tapachula, Mexico, with a band of street warriors called the Mara Salvatrucha brotherhood. The leader of the Tapachula branch of the Mara gang, Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), has the most ferocious facial tattoos in movie history, and he is, shall we say, a tad unsentimental when it comes to the welfare of the gang and the broader attachments of its members. aspar has brought a new recruit, 12-year-old Smiley, who will have to prove himself.

The Mara gang, who are well known in Mexico, make the Jets and the Sharks, to say little of the members of Fight Club, look like groups of poet-tasting fairies out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Theirs is a world of blood and fire, of rituals and revenge, and when Caspar crosses the line he finds himself one of the hunted. The freight trains out of Tapachula carry hundreds of would-be illegal immigrants heading for the border.

They sit on the roof in all weathers and risk being robbed by the Mara. After a terrible incident, Caspar ends up on the roof of the moving train, where he meets Sayra and her father. Will they make it to America? Will Caspar ever be free of the Mara? And will these two teenagers find in each other the love they have always missed?

Beautifully shot and perfectly realised, Sin Nombre is a gripping narrative that also manages to be a tale of our times. From The Gold Rush (1925) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and In America (2002), the myth of the pioneer or the immigrant who struggles through violence and ill luck to reach the American frontier is a potent and dramatic one. But with Sin Nombre the genre is given an entirely new face. Movies born out of real struggle and true jeopardy are too scarce nowadays. You might hold your breath over a leap but very seldom over an idea. Yet watching this film, you care not only about the characters’ fates but you care about the values and the forces that determine their fates. This is film-making at its absolute height and, in today’s terms, both very welcome and very unusual. Sin Nombre brings a fresh fund of imagination to circumstances so real they could break your heart.

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In director Cary Fukunaga a star is born. Still attached to the graduate film programme at New York University, he has previously made only one short film, Victoria Para Chino, a tale about illegal immigrants who suffocated in a trailer in Victoria, Texas. During research for that project, Fukunaga found himself deep in Mexico learning not only about the immigrant culture but the gang culture that runs in tandem with it. He looked along the border of Guatemala and Mexico to find the stories of immigrants we don’t often hear — those for whom Mexico, never mind America, is a great golden dream. He met gang members in prisons and rode the terrible trains that carry the people away. 

The growing tenderness between Caspar and Sayra is a little movie in itself, a tableau of possible calm amid a sloshing sea of violence and turpitude. They exist in a world where loyalties run deep but where people get lost in seconds.

There is nothing pinned on to this movie, no macro-economic argument, but you come away with a fully imagined sense of what the world’s economy can do to individual communities. In Latin America the flipside of socialist romance is on view: gangs, drugs, black-market profiteering, exploitation of immigrants, the whole kit and caboodle of failed idealism in one of its prime modern settings. Fukunaga saw it and he wants you to see it, the nightmare of lives that begin in hope.

The past 10 years have seen a brilliant opening up of Latin American film to international audiences. Amores Perros, City of God, Y tu Mama Tambien — films that bring the heat and the surprise of everyday reality into the realm of truly cinematic storytelling. Sin Nombre now joins that company. In energy and style and reportorial zeal it is possibly the best of the group, and shows great promise for the future.

The film will linger in the mind long after its devastating conclusion. You leave the cinema breathless and disquieted but also with a sense of having had something important revealed to you. In a very strong field, this is the year’s best film so far.