Here’s a hypnotic, hard to pin down, film-essay shot on the migrant trail across the border between Mexico and the US. Initially I had misgivings about its approach: the desperate plight of undocumented immigrants getting the experimental arthouse treatment struck me as unfeeling and irrelevant. But the film’s narcotic strangeness forces you to look again at a familiar headline story, treated unsensationally and sensitively – though at a patience-testing slow pace. El Mar La Mar is closer to a gallery installation than a night out at the cinema.
Co-directors Joshua Bonnetta and JP Sniadecki collage desert sequences (Instagrammable sunsets, the light of a torch bobbing up and down far on the horizon in the dead of night) with the testimonies of migrants, border guards and others. The interviews run against a black screen with zero information about who’s talking. An American charity worker describes finding a dead body on the sun-bleached grass (it looked like a backpack, she says), still clutching a water bottle, while vultures circle above. Two men weep recalling their harrowing journey across the desert.
The film’s most haunting images are of items found: mobile phones, clothes, a pair of glasses next to footprints in the sand. What made their owners abandon these things? What were they running from? Shooting for more than three years, Bonnetta and Sniadecki put microphones inside cacti and on barbed wire fences to create the soundtrack, a buzzy wonder of sounds. Their film pushes the limits of documentary filmmaking and will likely push the tolerance of viewers. This is a demanding watch, the arthouse cinema equivalent of the marshmallow experiment, testing the attention span of audiences.
