When Migration Becomes a Matter of Science Fiction: El Mar La Mar

Abstract

This paper analyzes El Mar La Mar (Joshua Bonnetta y J. P. Sniadecki, 2017), a documentary about the migration crisis at the U.S. southern border that seeks to overcome the perceptual numbness caused by «over-familiar» images. To do so, it departs from the iconographic regimes of migrant cinema and turns instead to the poetic estrangement that characterizes Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction films. Through strategies that defamiliarize the gaze across much of its runtime, the documentary confronts the viewer with a sensory experience of the Sonoran Desert akin to that of Stalker (1979) and its detailed focus on the physical and material world of the Forbidden Zone. However, this aesthetic revaluation is only the starting point and is complemented by an ending that is strictly ethical. The final segment of the documentary adopts the traits of the sentient ocean in Solaris (1972), a world that draws the viewer’s attention to what lies beneath its surface: the thousands of migrant deaths that occurred during attempted crossings. It is through this complementary aesthetic and ethical movement that El Mar La Mar provokes in the viewer a response that is sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once.