Thread: Sundance Review: Crossing Arizona

http://www.cinematical.com/2006/01/19/s ... g-arizona/

Sundance Review: Crossing Arizona
Posted Jan 19th 2006 6:11PM by James Rocchi

It's one of the paradoxes of human existence; things that don't really exist can have an incredible amount of meaning. Nature doesn't make national borders; people do. In Crossing Arizona, director Joseph Mathew looks at illegal immigration to America from Mexico by looking at the people and politics of one region, and the end result is a documentary that casts more light than heat on both sides of the issue, even if you can't help but wish the film had actually come up to a slightly more invigorating boil.

Mathew's careful to talk to a broad spectrum of people – policymakers and migrant workers, coroners and community activists, the border cops trying to stop illegal immigration and the 'coyotes' who lead people from Mexico to America in exchange for money. Mathew's also not shy about exploring the cold, hard economic facts of illegal immigration. Every time you go to the grocery store for produce, a shadow-shrouded Arizona farmer explains, you're benefiting from illegal immigration. A chili-picking migrant worker explains his view of the same phenomenon: "Gringos don't want to work here. Only Mexicans work here. Gringo's don't want to work. Only in the office." He then mimes typing and laughs ruefully.

So we see the efforts of groups like No More Deaths, which places water in the desert for illegal immigrants to use so they can survive; we also see the efforts of The Minuteman Project, which creates citizen patrols to watch the border and do the job they feel the Federal Government is shirking. (The sequence built around The Minuteman Project – as a piece of regional political activism becomes a national media circus – is easily the most satisfying part of the film; you wish the rest of Crossing Arizona had the same snap.)

Crossing Arizona moves sure-footedly from air-conditioned TV studios where pundits spout blather (Bill O'Reilly speaks his praise for how well the Red Chinese have prevented illegal immigration from North Korea, and points to them as a model for the US) to the heat and dust of the desert Arizona and Sonora share, where corpses grow stiff and taut in the sun and heat that killed them. Crossing Arizona shows the audiences several corpses, and it seems gratuitous only until you recognize that these few dead are representing hundreds, thousands more. Crossing Arizona may not have the muckracking whip-crack energy of more attention-getting documentaries, but it's got a careful, graceful intelligence that finds the individual people and the big picture in a complex, real issue of concern.

http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2006/01/pa ... _bu_2.html

PARK CITY '06 BUZZ DAILY: "Crossing Arizona" Premiere; Friday Night Party Madness; Saturday Parties


by Brian Brooks (January 21, 2006)
Outside the Holiday Village theater yesterday, a small gathering of press had assembled around a group of people in the parking lot. A CBS crew and a Reuters cameraman were shooting members of the opposing sides of the national immigration debate. Joseph Mathew's "Crossing Arizona," screening in the festival's documentary competition, takes a look at the tense stand-off that is occurring along the U.S./Mexican border in Arizona, which has seen thousands die since the mid '90s. The film spotlights the crisis through the personal accounts of Mike Wilson, an Indian living on native land that has become a popular route for migrants, and who works to leave jugs of water in the desert for the people heading north. Ray Ybara works at the A.C.L.U., fighting for migrants' rights and monitoring a civil group known as the Minutemen who made headlines last year by policing the border to stem the flow of illegal aliens.

Minutemen leader Chris Simcox joined Ybara, Wilson, Mathew and "Crossing Arizona" producer Dan DeVivo for a lively Q & A following the screening. Most in the audience seemed to sympathize with the migrants, but there were several lively dissenters. "How many illegals is finally too much? One million? Two million? Ten million? All of Mexico? When does the number of migrants become too much for you?" asked one audience member to Ybara. Wilson chimed in that as a Native American, his ancestors probably asked the same thing back in 1491. Simcox argued that allowing the flow of illegal workers into the country comes down to a moral issue.

"It's immoral to have people come here and engaging in an underground economy with no [labor] laws protecting them," Simcox said, "I say, secure the border and then create a viable migrant worker program for legal immigrants who come here via a point of entry." They seemed to acknowledge that the controversy won't be ending soon, but Wilson concluded, "nobody deserves to die in the desert because of no water."