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.