El Mar La Mar
16mm to 5K | 5.1 | 94 minutes | 2017|
Cinematography: Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki
Sound design: Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki
Sound recording mixer: Joshua Berger
“The first collaboration between film and sound artist Bonnetta and filmmaker/anthopologist Sniadecki is a lyrical and highly topical film in which the Sonoran Desert, among the deadliest routes taken by those crossing from Mexico to the United States, is depicted a place of dramatic beauty and merciless danger. Haunting 16mm images of the unforgiving landscape and the human traces within it are supplemented with an intricate soundtrack of interwoven sounds and oral testimonies. Urgent yet never didactic, El mar la mar allows this symbolically fraught terrain to take shape in vivid sensory detail, and in so doing, suggests new possibilities for the political documentary. A Cinema Guild release.” NYFF 61
"El mar la mar masterfully weaves together sublime 16-mm shots of nature and weather phenomena, animals, people and the tracks they leave behind with a polyphonic soundtrack, creating a cinematographic exploration of the desert habitat, a multi-faceted panorama of a highly politicised stretch of land, a film poem that conjures up the ocean.” Michael Sicinski
