A Mexican teenager whose dreams of becoming a soccer star are disrupted when his mother dies. He's smuggled across the border with the promise of a better life but is instead sold to a sweatshop in downtown LA.
In Guita Schyfter’s El águila y el gusano, an intricate plot serves to intersect the destinies of several characters: the owner of a beauty salon in love with “all things Chinese”, a politician with a taste for oration who couldn’t care less about the problems of his country, a political adviser whose counsel is never considered and a shady investigator with a name that nobody seems to recall. The script by Schyfter and Hugo Hiriart, her longtime collaborator and author of the 2013 novel on which the film is based, bristles with finely-crafted, hilarious dialogue.
After high school is over, three friends have to choose their paths. Pastor dreams of flying and winning Flor´s love, while her jealous brother Nacho gets seduced by the local gang, and falls in to crime.
Willy's quest to find Marlena, his lost love, takes him from Mexico to Canada, where he is hired as a seasonal worker at the Bécotte farm, near Montreal. Several destinies intersect, worlds collide, tensions rise and moments of magical realism emerge during long work days.