“First they wanted me to sell me for parts, my organs, or if not, to prostitute me. I refused that, so they told me to work tricking girls so that they could do to them everything they wanted to do to me. “I accepted because they tied my father to a chair and threatened him with a gun,” says a testimony. “There was a lot of danger where we lived, two of my cousins had already disappeared and the boys and girls were being stolen from the schools,” says another person in front of the camera. “Last time, the worst shooting in my town lasted almost three and a half hours,” remembers another.
What these experiences have in common is violence. Some in Mexico, others in Honduras, El Salvador or Haiti. They are stories of survivors who demonstrate in one of many shelters in the State of Tijuana, 35 kilometers from the border with the United States. Those who tell, Lázaro, Patricia, Marvin, Ximena, Chuy, Betsy, to mention a few, also have another thing in common, they are all children or adolescents, who are looking for a better life away from their homes and who give it a voice and a face. to the migration crisis between the two northern countries.
Far from home, the second documentary by Carlos Hernández, follows a group of children and adolescents, originating from different Latin American countries, who live in shelters in Tijuana. Everyone is waiting for a response to their asylum request to enter the United States. The wait is long and uncertain, they are childhoods on pause. The director was with Luis Montalvo, responsible for the film's photography, for a period of three years working on migration issues on the Mexican border. Upon the arrival of one of the migrant caravans, they noticed “a change in the migratory paradigm.”
“It was evident that we were no longer in the presence of only or mostly men who were looking for better working conditions, but rather we were in the presence of entire families traveling and even minors traveling alone. So, faced with such a radical change from what we had witnessed in our stays there in Tijuana, we decided to turn the camera towards the boys,” says the director.
The filming took them three months, a period of time that most of the minors were going to be in the shelters waiting for their application for asylum in the United States. It was, through a natural process, that they were able to find the voices of the children. protagonists for the documentary. “What I always say is that we chose each other during the work process. Before starting filming we were hanging out with the boys and girls, talking, eating, playing with cars or soccer. That generated an interaction and began to weave bonds of trust and a certain friendship, which I think was a reciprocal element that, in the end, when we started taking out the camera, those people were the ones who decided to participate,” he says.
Hernández says that, through the testimonies, the challenge was to become aware of the great problems that the region is experiencing. Despite the magnitude of the situation that is seen and heard about these human displacements, the director affirms that there is still a lack of knowledge and it is obvious that child migration occurs in such large numbers. According to the documentary, 19,000 minors request asylum in the United States each year.
“They are very hard stories regarding their relationship with their places of origin, due to the presence of drug trafficking, gangs, maras or the political persecution they face. It is something systemic throughout the region. “That is what we should be talking about to understand, or begin to understand, really the seriousness of the situation, that we should perhaps be talking about displaced people and a humanitarian crisis as a result of constant violence,” he adds.
A factor that was key to the filming was trust, a feeling that was reinforced, Hernández admits, when the children and adolescents who lent their voices to the documentary realized that they were not producing sensational content and that the filming team was not was trying to open wounds, but, on the contrary, there was the intention of “responsible work” involved.
“It is difficult for us to turn to see the girls and boys, at least of those ages, their childhoods, and listen. I think that is one of the things that the film provides, what they are going through, emotions, thoughts. It must be noted that they are strong stories, but they are all crossed by the playful processes of the children themselves. Observing the children makes you realize the resilience they have, they transform things into games and that helps to understand a lot. more transparent about the situation they are going through,” he says.
Far from home, already on billboards throughout the Republic, has been present, above all, at festivals for minors, girls, boys, and the empathy and closeness that this generates for young people is “very impressive,” says Hernández, because They are identified in a very natural way, they are concepts such as home, friendships, goodbyes, relationships with which they identify very clearly. This same empathy is the same one that should be tried to achieve in different actors that are part of migration policies.
“Nothing more than the politics of Stay in Mexico It has been devastating for many families and the persecution that they now also experience in our country is so evident that I believe that the documentary was born from a very real need to try to portray what is happening in such a way that we can generate empathy, first among the people themselves. Mexican citizens and then before authorities so that humanitarian public policies and real help are generated for all these people who are displaced,” he concludes.
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