Barren, beautiful, and ultimately foreboding, the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and the United States serves as a potential passageway but also a perilous death trap for immigrants. J.P. Sniadecki (The Iron Ministry) and Joshua Bonnetta’s timely portrait of the American southwest uses the landscape as a poetic yet cautionary backdrop to regional stories told in voiceover—some fascinating, some farfetched, and some devastating.
Shot in 16mm over the course of several years, Sniadecki and Bonnetta take a different approach that is both elegant and dreadful in recounting the anecdotes of people making the impossible journey on foot across the border. Named after a poem by Rafael Alberti, El mar la mar evokes the comparison between the sea and the desert and the against-all-odds journeys that immigrants make across both.
Press
"Pushing the aesthetic boundaries of nonfiction filmmaking. - Slant Magazine
Directors’ Biography
J.P. Sniadecki: J.P. Sniadecki (b. 1979) works between China and the United States as an artist and anthropologist whose films explore collective experience, sensory ethnography, and the possibilities of cinema. His work is in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and has been exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale, the Whitney Biennale, the Shenzhen Biennale, the Centre George Pompidou, and the Guggenheim, as well as at international film festivals, such as Berlin, Locarno, New York, AFI, Viennale, BAFICI, and Beijing Independent Film Festival. Coorganizer of the traveling screening series “Cinema on the Edge,” which showcases independent Chinese film, he has written articles for Cinema Scope, Visual Anthropology Review, and the edited volume DV-Made China. He currently teaches in the Documentary Media MFA program at Northwestern University.
Joshua Bonnetta: Joshua Bonnetta (b. Canada 1979) is an artist working with analogue film and sound in various modes of theatrical exhibition, performance and installation. His work has shown at The Berlinale, The Toronto International Film Festival, The Images Festival, Mutek International Festival of Electronic Music, European Media Arts Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Cleveland Museum of Modern Art and at festivals and venues through out Europe, U.K., Russia, North & South America. He was the 2009 recipient of the National Film Board of Canada award to 'Best emerging/mid-career Canadian film/video artist' and the winner of the Deluxe Cinematic Vision Award for Audio-Visual Innovation in 2010 and 2012 from The Images Festival.
He has published sound releases with Senufo Editions, Experimedia, Shelter Press and Canti Magnetici.
He is an associate professor for Film and Video Art and Sound Art at Ithaca College in New York State.
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