August 19, 2009 11:00AM EDT

Watch: Which Way Home

[This piece originally ran in May during the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.]

In Which Way Home, director Rebecca Cammisa follows unaccompanied migrant children who travel alone through Mexico as they try to reach the United States. From impoverished families in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, these young kids (who make up about five percent of the Latin American migrants) are on a brutal journey: they travel on the top of trains, where gang raids, rapes, and death are not uncommon.

Despite the grave subject matter (which also recieved the fiction treatment earlier this year with Cary Fukunaga's Sin Nombre), Cammisa introduces us to a group of charming, hopeful kids. Kevin and Fito are a pair of best friends barely in their teens from rural Honduras who dream of abundance once they get to the States. Ten-year-old Jose is in a Mexican detention center for youths after being abandoned by smugglers and is waiting to be deported back to his home in Honduras. Olga and Freddy are a pair of nine-year-olds who are hoping to connect with their parents and siblings once they arrive in America. Their stories are heartbreaking, not just because of their desperation to reach the US despite statistics stacked against them, but because theirs are the kinds of lives that are rarely given the spotlight in the news.

In a Q&A after the AMC theater screening, an audience member voiced his concern about whether that the kids in the film truly had informed consent. Cammisa noted, “These are children. You talk to them to see if they’re comfortable. And then right away you’d talk to the children’s parents. Parents were thankful. Maybe they thought our presence was making them safer?” She also said that the rule for the film, which took six years to make, was “children first, film second.”

Cammisa memorably summed up her film: “People are making decisions to get to the U.S. any way they can. And they’re making dangerous, dangerous decisions.” She hopes policy changes will help the situation. With an HBO airing already scheduled for this August, hopefully the attention generated by Which Way Home will help expedite that process.

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Which Way Home premieres on Monday, August 24 on HBO, and plays throughout August and September. Become a fan on Facebook.

Here's an interesting piece from Cinema Blend on the connection between this doc and Focus Features' Sin Nombre, which is out on DVD September 1.