STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Kate Bosworth's mother has never forgotten how her daughter once stood up for an elementary school classmate who was being made fun of by classmates for his less than stellar singing.

"She has always been a champion of the underdog. She was a champion of the underdog before it became fashionable," recounted Patty Bosworth, in Sun Valley this week for the U.S. premiere of her daughter's new film "Nona."

That is why earlier this year the woman who has had leading roles in such movies as "The Horse Whisperer," "Superman Returns," "Blue Crush" and the current National Geographic series "The Long Road Home" found herself at home in Los Angeles this past year arranging hotel accommodations and monitoring reports of criminal activity for her husband and a handful of cast members as they made the dangerous trek from Honduras through Guatemala and Mexico into the United States.

"I'm a very compassionate kind person, not mean at all. But if I see injustice I will get ferocious," said Bosworth, who plays a police investigator in the film. “NONA, which means ‘No name,’ is a difficult story, but it’s a story that needs to be told. And it’s a labor of love.”

Bosworth and her husband Michael Polish attended the premiere of their new film on Friday, creating a stir among audience members when they and three cast members took their seats in the fourth row at the Magic Lantern Cinema.

The audience watched, hushed, as the film took them on a journey with an impressionable young Honduran girl who had enlisted the aid of a personable young man to take her north to the United States where her mother lived.

Her father and brothers had been killed, their lives taken for so little, said the young woman, who worked for a funeral home painting the bodies of the dead.

Soon the girl and the coyote are on a journey north. Their sense of newfound freedom coupled with peril is magnified as they ride atop a train.

Polish took the bold step of telling the story of them making their way north  in Spanish with subtitles. The film, made on a small budget, reverted to English when Nona reached the United States.

You could have heard a pin drop for about three minutes following the dramatic conclusion of the movie, as the audience tried to absorb the film, which is a must-see for those who care about social justice issues.

"It's a very important, very powerful movie," said Ketchum librarian and ESL teacher Janet Ross-Heimer, who lived in Honduras for seven years working at a children's hospital.

“You hear the statistics but you don’t understand, and it’s important to reveal how every one of these girls—and boys—are human,” said Bosworth. “Everyone has hopes and dreams, and to have a cute boy say, ‘I can help you out,’ when you live in such impoverished, dangerous places is pretty alluring.”

Polish, who wrote, produced and shot the film, got the idea after reading an article about a sex house discovered in Los Angeles not too far from where he and Bosworth live. He visited one where he saw what amounted to cages for the women that worked there.

“Sex trafficking is one of the end results. Some might also end up in the food industry, working in kitchens,” he said. “I wanted to make a film about how it happens, how girls end up in those places.”

Polish met with Sulem Calderon, whose mother and father had fled civil war in El Salvador to come to the United States. He cast her without an audition over lunch.

Jesy McKinney, the son of Christian pastors in San Diego, was familiar with Latin America, having done several mission projects in various countries.

And Giancarlo Ruiz was an actor who had had roles in such movies as “The Neighbor.”

Polish instructed them to take nothing more than a backpack—not even a change of clothes--so  they’d leave a small footprint on their way north. And they took off on a guerilla-style shoot—a journey that resembled the journey the characters in the movie were taking.

There were no food caterers. No makeup artists. Polish had to hide his film cameras to mitigate the risks of someone kidnapping them and holding them for ransom. It was a journey so perilous Bosworth could not go—insurers would never have insured an actor as noteworthy as she.

“The guy running the cash register at the supermarket had a shotgun. The guy manning the gas pumps had a shot gun,” said Ruiz.

“I was telling Michael all the time—you can’t go west, or you can’t go east from such and such town because it’s incredibly dangerous,” added Bosworth, who financed the film. “Nothing was easy about this movie. Michael could have shot it in Los Angeles, but it was important for him to go, to see the dangers these people deal with.”

Doing the shoot as they did enabled the crew to shoot scenes chronologically—something that almost never happens in filming. And that helped them build their narrative.

“We were pretty much playing our characters, washing our clothes by hand, and that’s what made it magical,” said Calderon.

The story hit close to home for Calderon.

“With El Salvador an hour away from Honduras, I really connected with Nona. That could have been my story had my parents not chosen to flee El Salvador,” she said. “My mother had to ride The Beast, which is the nickname given to the freight trains that bring immigrants north because so many people die, falling off the train or getting run over trying to board it. And she saw people died on the train.:

McKinney called making the movie “the best experience of my young life.”

“We were no name actors, which fit the story. And to find someone like Michael who is so willing to tell stories like this that need to be told and to do it in such an authentic way was amazing,” he said.

Bosworth came to Sun Valley with the cast, high school friends and her parents, who came from Boston to see the premiere and watch Bosworth receive the Sun Valley Film Festival’s Pioneer Award.  She and Polish plan to take the film to festivals in Richmond, Va.; Washington, D.C., Bozeman, Mont., and Manchester, England, before finding a distributor to put it in movie theaters.

“I’m so excited to be here. This is a prestigious festival,” said Bosworth,

Bosworth says she and her husband would like to do more stories of this sort.

“These are very difficult movies to make, and they’re hard to finance. But we’d love to follow up on what inspires us, on stories that could have an impact in some way,” she said. 

They’re already at work on a film revolving around Sharon Tate, the actress murdered by Charles Manson’s gang.

“We want to celebrate her life,” said Polish. “Everyone knows the end but we want to tell about her beginnings, her potential. The man who killed her—I won’t say his name—said he made her famous. But the truth is she was a very kind, very talented actress who was being groomed in the right way. And we’re getting lots of stories from her sister Deborah telling us things the general public doesn’t know.”