Thursday, March 22 | 7:30 pm
Emerging from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, an experimental arts laboratory that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, El Mar La Mar takes a singular, and deeply immersive look at the US-Mexican border. Situated within the forbidding Sonoran Desert, we encounter undocumented immigrants, traces of others who have come before, varieties of wildlife, and the severe weather that batters the border region. Mixed within this richly poetic visual and auditory framework are the testimonies—both harrowing and mythic—of locals and travelers alike. In the words of Sight & Sound‘s Jordan Cronk, El Mar La Mar is “an unsettlingly topical portrait of the American southwest… [that] plays more like a horror film than an exercise in journalistic nonfiction.” El Mar La Mar was one of the absolute standouts of the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival.
Read Director of Curatorial Affairs, Dr. Michael J. Anderson’s Berlin Film Festival review on the Museum Films blog.
Directors J.P. Sniadecki & Joshua Bonnetta | 2017 | In English and Spanish with English subtitles | 94 minutes | NR | DCP