2501 Migrants: A Journey (2010/Cinema Libre DVD)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: C Documentary: C+
If there
is one thing I am sick and tired of is the ugly trend of bashing people from
other countries, especially people from Mexico
coming to the U.S.
to try and have a better life. Illegal
immigration does NOT equal a person being illegal and legal terms aside, it is
totally unacceptable in all cases to label anyone this way. Why?
Because it has become a political football, a new form a palatable
racism and these are human being we are talking about, not some stupid
polemic. It is so serious that people
have died trying to have a better life and Yolanda Cruz’s 2510 Migrants: A Journey (2010) tells us about this in a new light.
Alejandro
Santiago is an artist who grew up in Teococuilco, a town he returns to find it
in trouble and of having many of its people try to come to the U.S. for a
better life. However, some of them did
not make it alive there or back. He
decides to make their lives and existence harder to ignore by building statues
as tribute to them, all 2,510 of them.
This nearly hour-long work shows us how.
Know that
I am not encouraging illegal activity or saying everyone coming over here is
free of being wrong of anything, but we are talking about people dying
here. The politics are a separate
essay. Until we start dealing with
people as not disposable (and that is a problem with people in the U.S.
who are citizens, let alone all of this) will this problem ever begin to get
solved. Yes, the artworks reminds one of
The Holocaust and rightly so, to people with dreams (think El Norte, for instance) who don’t know what to do or where to
turn. Silence before and silence now
made all of it possible and more people need to speak up with solutions,
especially those with the power and wealth to fix this for the better. 2510
Migrants: A Journey is a record of a very important record that should not
be ignored.
The
letterboxed 1.78 X 1 image is soft and has aliasing errors, but color is not
bad and this is a documentary, so it is going to be a little rough and under
the circumstances, we're lucky it exists at all. I liked the editing too. The Dolby Digital 2.0 sound is simple stereo
at best, sometimes with location audio issues, but more consistent than
expected considering the effort it took to make it. Extras include Deleted Scenes, trailers,
Extended Interviews and a Photo Gallery.
- Nicholas Sheffo
