Few people truly appreciate the grueling journey that immigrants take when they decide to head to the United States. It is an odyssey filled with danger, pain, suffering and sacrifice. Making a film about it while also embarking on a similar voyage is just as tough.

Diego Quemada-Diez undertook this very journey with his new film "La Jaula de Oro," a movie that follows four teenagers as they leave native Guatemala to fulfill their American Dream. Most films dealing with this subject matter often leave the audience on a high as the character finishes the elusive journey. In Quemada-Diez's case, the path is a tragic one, one that leaves its characters in precarious circumstances similar to those they faced as they started their journey.

"I wanted to show that when we look for happiness elsewhere, whether in another country or with other people, we are condemned to disappointment," he stated. "That's why at the end when Juan's journey ends and fate destroys his hopes, he starts a more internal transformative journey."

The Spanish-born director came to the idea for his first feature film when he traveled to Mazatlan in Sinaloa and met a taxi driver, Tono, in 2003. He moved in with Tono and his family for two months in a home located by the railroad tracks. Everyday a train would arrive with immigrants and Quemada-Diez would get a chance to hear their stories.

"I felt that they were heroes," he stated about the impact the immigrants had on him. "I felt that they were making incredible sacrifices for their families. I wanted to give voice to the stories and people that need them. To show the story as real as possible."

So then he started to collect testimonials for about seven years from different parts of Mexico, Guatemala and surrounding areas. He then compiled all of the testimonials into the stories of four children. He had previously done a similar amount of exhaustive research for his film "I Want to Be a Pilot," in which he gathered testimonials from 60 children and then turned it into the story of one child.

Quemada-Diez revealed that he chose child protagonists for a variety of reasons. The first was that it showed a different cultural aspect as lot of children are expected to undergo the journey because their parents did it before them. "In some parts of Mexico and Guatemala, their adolescence is marked by this journey. It is a kind of ritual," the directed noted before explaining a more thematic ideal behind the choice. "I wanted to show the kinds of opportunity we are giving our youth. Or really the lack of opportunities. Unfortunately there aren't many out there and in some parts of Mexico the best opportunities are coming from working for crime or being a cash register at Walmart."

The final reason was a more emotional one.

"People also tend to judge immigrants negatively as destitute and criminals and showing children instead was a way to soften that outlook," he revealed.

In picking the roles of his four children Juan, Chauk, Samuel and Sara, the director went through 6,000 kids.

The audition process took a number of steps. If they had the right look, a "powerful look with special eye," the children were asked if they wanted to make the journey to the U.S. Then they had to dance to show their ability to use their bodies. Then he had them improvise.

"I wanted someone with a spark, that something special. They needed to have some sort of creativity," He stated about his actors.

He sure found it in the tremendous talents that included Brandon Lopez as Juan, Rodolfo Dominguez as Chauk, Karen Martinez as Sara and Carlos Chajon as Samuel.

Lopez played the main character, Juan, and Quemada-Diez felt that the actor had a transformative experience while making the film.

"He went through that journey. It transformed his life. By the time we filmed the final scenes, he was a changed person."

Another interesting challenge was the character of Chauk, who is from the Tzotzil culture and does not speak a word of Spanish in the film. In Dominguez, Quemada-Diez found the perfect actor who did not speak Spanish. In order to communicate a tutor was hired to teach the boy Spanish and translate.

"The reality is that we rarely needed her," Quemada-Diez revealed ironically. "He understood us pretty well."

Part of the reason for this comprehension came from the director's way of working with his actors. While he did have a script, the teens never actually read any of it. He would describe scenes for them and then put them in the world.

"I worked on creating the context and environment and they discovered it by themselves," Quemada-Diez noted.

This worked into his overall vision for fusing the fiction of his script with the reality of the world and situation. This extended to the other parts of filming, particularly scenes taking place aboard trains.

There were no green screens or model trains that the cast and crew used for shooting on trains. The production team for "La Jaula de Oro" would actually board the train with the actors before its departure and shoot them on it. But the children were not alone. Along with them were a plethora of real-life migrants who were taking their journey with them.

In order to "cast" the migrants as extras, members of the casting department would move ahead to the upcoming locations of the process and hire the migrants. They would get food, drink and some pay for being in the film.

The experience of working in this way allowed him to find art from real life in unexpected ways. One particularly prominent scene aboard a train has one migrant singing to pass the moment. It a wrenching moment, but was no scripted.

"The idea was to take the best of fiction and the best of the documentary and mix it into a work that has as much truth as possible," the director stated.

There was only one location where fiction and imagination had to take a greater degree of control, to some extent -- the U.S. border. At one point in the film, the characters do cross over, eluding all sorts of traps and pursuits.

While they could not film at the border proper, they managed to find a location that replicated the feel of the American border.

"It is based on the story of a child and the journey he went through," explained Quemada-Diez. "He told me about the three tunnels, the dogs, the helicopters and we reproduced them as best as we could. We wanted to try and portray that sequence as if they were escaping from a concentration camp."

The film was shot on 16mm, a rarity these days in an industry where digital has all but taken over. Quemada-Diez noted that he never had any intention of shooting digital and that 16mm film was perfect for what he was creating.

However, he did encounter one minor difficulty with the medium while driving through Mexico. As the story goes, the production team was driving down a road when the director realized that there were police trucks with X-Ray scanners. Those scanners could potentially expose the film cans if the vehicles drove by them. However, by the time Quemada-Diez realized they were near the scanners, one of the vehicles had already driven by the trucks, thus exposing some of the film.

Fortunately the scanners only exposed a few corners of the frame, something that was easily restored in postproduction.

The finished film would go on to win a plethora of awards around the world, including three at the Cannes Film Festival among others. It has been hailed the most awarded film in Mexican history with a total of 81 accolades to date. With that kind of reception one would imagine that the next step, theatrical distribution, would be easy.

It wasn't.

Because the sales agent had sold rights to HBO, most theatrical distributors stayed away. Other larger studios completely rejected the project on the grounds that "it was not their style of movie."

"I told [those big studios] that they had a responsibility with the community, but it didn't register," he added.

Ultimately Quemada-Diez got some advice from members of the Sundance Institute and alongside his producers, decided to distribute the film on their own. They spent $25,000 in the process, but found several partners, including Cinema Tropical, to help exhibit the film in theaters.

"I am happy and grateful to Double Exposure, Cinema Tropical and the cinemas that helped us bring the film to US audiences," said the director.

The difficulty of getting the film in theaters was not lost on Quemada-Diez who learned a valuable lesson moving forward.

 "You need to include some money for distribution in the original budget. You rarely think about that when you make the movie," he stated. "If we would have thought of that, then it would have been a lot easier to get the film out there. It would have been far less stressful."

The director hopes that its universal themes connect with the viewers.

"Ultimately I want people who watch this movie to realize that beyond the racial differences, the language barriers and the borders, we are all humans."

The film hit theaters in time for Labor Day weekend.