The Migrant Trail Game
“THE MIGRANT TRAIL presents a first-person journey through Arizona’s desert borderlands. Play as an undocumented immigrant attempting to cross the Arizona desert and/or a border patrol agent attempting to secure the border. Playing the game offers an alternative platform to further engage conversation, investigation and inquiry, into the themes and questions raised by the documentary.
Migrant Mode Intro
Every year an unknown number of migrants cross through the harsh Sonoran desert from Mexico into Arizona. They pay $1500-$2500 to join a crossing party, that is led by for hire guides referred to as Coyotes. If one cannot keep up, twists ankle or runs out of water, he or she is left behind and many die. On average, the remains of 200 dead migrants are found each year. It’s not known how many are never found.
Border Patrol Mode Intro
Every day U.S. Border Patrol agents patrol the Sonoran Desert along the Arizona-Mexico border. Their job is to apprehend undocumented border crossers, provide first aid to the injured, and locate the remains of dead migrants.
ENGLISH
[caption id="attachment_2550" align="alignleft" width="194"]
The Undocumented[/caption][caption id="attachment_2546" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Border Crossing By the Numbers[/caption][caption id="attachment_2545" align="alignleft" width="194"]
The Undocumented on PBS Independent Lens[/caption][caption id="attachment_2538" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Immigration Debate on Mass Migrant Deaths[/caption][caption id="attachment_2537" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Full Frame Festival[/caption][caption id="attachment_2539" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Death In The Desert[/caption][caption id="attachment_2536" align="alignleft" width="194"]
PBS Program Tonight Traces Search for Migrants[/caption][caption id="attachment_2547" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Independent Lens “The Undocumented”[/caption][caption id="attachment_2535" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Documenting the Undocumented[/caption][caption id="attachment_2544" align="alignleft" width="194"]
“The Undocumented”, a Film About Those Who Didn’t Make It[/caption][caption id="attachment_2542" align="alignleft" width="194"]
The Undocumented Airs on PBS[/caption][caption id="attachment_2541" align="alignleft" width="194"]
The Undocumented Premiers on PBS Independent Lens[/caption][caption id="attachment_2548" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Docutopia #41: Double Takes- When Documentaries Collide[/caption][caption id="attachment_2543" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Marco Williams’ “The Undocumented” premiering on Independent Lens[/caption]
SPANISH
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Estreno en TV de ‘The Undocumented’[/caption][caption id="attachment_2540" align="alignleft" width="194"]
Documental de Voz a Inmigrantes Desaparecidos[/caption]
Director/Producer: Marco Williams
Co-Producer: Thomas Peyton
Editors: Kris Liem, David Meneses
Associate Producers: Patricia Bernabe, Horatio Potter, Elizabeth Stanton
Camera and Sound: Marco Williams
Additional Camera: Hector Matta, Thomas Peyton, Claudio Rocha
Post Production Producer: Jennifer Latham
Music composed by: Richard Martinez
Executive Producer for the Fledgling Fund: Diana Barrett
Executive Producer for ITVS: Sally Jo Fifer
Executive Producer for New York Community Trust: Jane Greenberg
Executive Producer for Two Tone Productions: Whitney Dow
Marco Williams is a George Foster Peabody and Alfred I duPont Silver Baton award-winning documentary filmmaker.
His directing credits include The Undocumented, 2013 (Full Frame, HRWFF, Independent Lens); Inside the New Black Panthers, 2008 (Nat Geo); Banished 2007, (Independent Lens, Sundance, Fullframe, Miami International Film Festival); Freedom Summer 2006, (History Channel, Full Frame); I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education 2004, (Nickelodeon); MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream 2003, (DiscoveryTimes); Two Towns of Jasper 2002, (P.O.V., Sundance); Making Peace: Rebuilding our Communities 1995, (PBS); The Pursuit of Happiness: With Arianna Huffington 1994, (PBS); Without A Pass 1992, (Showtime, Sundance); In Search of Our Fathers 1991, (Frontline, Sundance, the Whitney Biennial); and From Harlem To Harvard 1982, (The Learning Channel).
Marco’s film awards include: Banished, the Knight Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Feature at the Miami International Film Festival and the Full Frame Documentary Festival Spectrum Award. Freedom Summer, Emmy Award for the series: Ten Days that Unexpectedly Changed America; I Sit Where I Want, the recipient of the 2005 Beacon Award; MLK Boulevard: The Concrete Dream; The National Association of Black Journalists First Place Salute to Excellence Award 2004.
Two Towns of Jasper, the 2004 George Foster Peabody Award and the 2004 Alfred I duPont Silver Baton. It is the winner of the 2002 Pan African Film Festival Outstanding Documentary Award, the Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival Silver Award for Best International Documentary (2002); it is also the recipient of the 2002 DoubleTake/Full Frame grand prize: The Center For Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award, and the winner of the 2002 Independent Feature Project Third Annual Anthony Radziwill Documentary Achievement Award. Two Towns of Jasper was broadcast on POV on PBS, the film and the directors were featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Nightline with Ted Koppel, and the film was the catalyst for a live town hall meeting—“America in Black and White”, anchored by Ted Koppel.
Williams’ film, In Search of Our Fathers was awarded The Silver Apple at the National Educational Film and Video Festival. The film was broadcast on the PBS program “Frontline”. It was exhibited at festivals throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. It was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1996 “Black Male Exhibition, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the Panorama section of the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival, the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, Cinema Du Reel, the Toronto Film Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Bombay International Film Festival.
Williams received a B.A. from Harvard University, in Visual and Environmental Studies. He received a Master of Arts degree from UCLA in Afro-American Studies and a Master of Fine Arts also from UCLA in their Producer’s Program. He is the recipient of the Institute of American Cultures Research Grant (1998 & 1990), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, (1987) and a Creative Artists Program grant (1984).
The Undocumented is a feature length cinema verite documentary that exposes a little known consequence of United States immigration policy. Since 1998 more than 2000 dead bodies and skeletal remains of illegal border crossers have been found in the desert in southern Arizona.
The film tells the story of Marcos Hernandez an undocumented Mexican living and working in Chicago. Marcos came to the United States, crossing through the Sonora Desert in southern Arizona. Each month he sends money to his mother in Mexico City, for medicine for his brother, Gustavo. Gustavo needs a kidney transplant.
But Marcos’ has another reason for coming to the United States, an even more pressing one. He has come to search for his father Francisco who disappeared in the Sonora Desert trying to enter into the United States undocumented. Chronicled over the course of Arizona’s deadly summer months, the film weaves Marcos’ search for his father with the efforts of humanitarians and Border Patrol agents who fight to prevent migrant deaths, medical investigators and the Mexican Consulate who work to identify dead border crossers, and Mexicans who struggle to accept the loss of a family member.
The film’s aesthetic is cinema verite. Unlike other documentaries, the film does not engage in a passive dialogue. The film’s characters don’t talk about migrant deaths. They are immersed in it. They patrol the desert. They rescue migrants. They discover human bones picked apart by wild animals. They wheel body after body in and out of a large refrigerator. And when the film arrives at the home of a migrant family in Mexico, that family is captured at the very apex of their grief, the arrival home of the coffin.
