Nava won critical acclaim for his first two features, both produced on minimal budgets and both co-written by his wife, filmmaker Anna Thomas: "The Confessions of Amans" (1973), a medieval drama, won the Best First Feature Award at the Chicago International Film Festival; and "El Norte" (1983), a gripping, harrowing account of Guatemalan emigres struggling to survive in Southern California, earned an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. He fared less happily with his first attempt at big-budget Hollywood filmmaking, the overblown "A Time of Destiny" (1988). Nava later, though, won some respect for making one of the several mainstream (if modestly scaled) Hollywood films attempting breakthroughs with the representation of Latino-American family life, "My Family, Mi Familia" (1995).