EL MAR LA MAR American Independents

Not so much pushing the boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking as obliterating them and beginning anew, this stunning film brilliantly deconstructs the formal elements of classic ethnographic cinema and reconstitutes them into a wholly new form, immersive and alive with sensorial detail, and above all, emotionally engaging and deeply felt. Beginning with a rhythmic, hypnotic visual tracing of a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, EL MAR LA MAR dives into matters of life and death in the Sonoran Desert, a place where the dance between destruction and renewal is played out against a backdrop of otherworldly beauty, where life is fragile yet legions of the desperate are dying to get in. – Cedar Sherbert