The Wonderful Country

On Far from Home (Carlos Hernández 2022)

(This text was written during Guadalajara Talents Press in June 2022 and published in Spanish in Butaca Ancha http://butacaancha.com/lejos-de-casa-la-regla-del-juego/on May 4th, 2023)

A group of boys plays with rocks, colorful toy cars, and dolls. Gracefully, they arrange these objects upon the dusty ground, in such a way that they create different scenes. Their innocent amusement represents the moment when immigrants try to cross the USA border and they are stopped by the Border Patrol. A difficult and threatening process here becomes a child play in the first-person plural since these children live in a shelter while they wait to return home or to get an asylum in the United States. Game is a serious matter. In this case, the ludic activity resembles that of a filmmaker: to place elements in a determinate space so that the fruits of imagination materialize. 

Childhood, games, and imagination are the three principles upon which Far from Home (Carlos Hernández 2022), the documentary where the previous sequence takes place, is built. The film follows the lives of boys and girls in an immigrant shelter in Tijuana, a border city between Mexico and the US. The movie deals with one of the biggest global phenomena nowadays, which in cinema has become a recurrent subject ­–The Golden Dream (Diego Quemada-Díez 2013) and Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi 2016) come to mind. However, Far from Home stands out for the careful attention it devotes to the children’s bodies and the way in which they interact. The film alternates between moments of playful activity and spontaneous testimonies. 

Carlos Hernandez doesn’t deal with childhood merely as a theme, nor in a distant or abstract way. On the contrary, the filmmaker registers the days in the shelter by emphasizing gestures, movement, and the lightsome children’s’ corporality. Thus, the film doesn’t try to give a biographical account that may fall into dramatism, gruesomeness, or an informative development solely. In this regard, Far from Home reminds, by contrast and similarity alike, to Mister Bachmann and His Class (2021), Maria Speth’s documentary, which follows an entire year in a Stadtallendorf school. In that town several children and their parents are refugees. The contrast lies in the length of Speth’s movie (almost four hours), as well as the period it covers. This allows to familiarize with those students in depth. Meanwhile, in Hernandez’ film, the intermittent brief testimonies don’t deepen in each child personal story, which causes a closer attention to their bodies themselves and to their immediate actions. Both films share an interest for humane warmness where the big sociopolitical subject, migration, becomes a subplot and not the main narrative. 

To achieve this, the presence of games is transcendental in Far from Home. They are not an escapism nor an entertainment that keeps the boys and girls distracted from their situation; they are, instead, a way in which imagination comes alive: a way of being in the world. In a sequence the children play basketball. The improvised hoop is one of the iron tools that is used in constructions, which has a circular space so that the ball can come through. Imagination lies there: in an object seeing another. Suddenly, in what appears to be direct cinema, there is mise-en-scène because the landscape offers some occasional props that create a relevant meaning. Like with the décor of a movie studio, a whole new space is created. In another moment, a small boy plays with his fingers crossed; he moves them and makes a choreography with them. He is framed in a close-up that lasts longer than the rest of the film’s shots. The length expands the time for contemplating this solitary game. No toys nor companions are needed to perform this ludic activity: our own body is more than enough. 

The testimonies where the children tell their personal anecdotes are filmed in frontal close-ups. The camera is placed at their height to listen to them carefully, as it meant to be. Most of the times, the events they allude to are traumatic experiences. The exercise of oral narrative implies the spectator’s imagination too, so that these cruel images, which cannot be shown, can be evoked somehow. However, Carlos Hernández’ register is very respectful and lets the children express in their own terms, beyond an adult agenda or justification. Perhaps the game with the toys that aimed to represent the immigrants and the Border Patrol is not analogous to the filmmaker’s craft but rather the filmmaker attempts to go back to childhood games in their work: to elaborate new worlds with the mind and with what is at hand, hoping that the world’s pain may be transformed into a dignifying gaze.