What We Leave Behind: An Intimate Cross-Border Family Documentary
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
The streaming service Netflix sometimes gets a bad rap, partly because of the sheer volume of uneven material available and an alarming number of sensational documentaries and docudramas about crooks and killers.
But, once in a while, you can find a film like What We Leave Behind, a documentary that treats the passage of time, and human life, with tenderness and respectful attention.
Julián Moreno ponders one last project in his remaining years.
Iliana Sosa’s more than six-years-in-the-making personal documentary packs a lot of information and emotion into a 71-minute package. The film, which won two jury prizes at the South By Southwest Film festival this year, was acquired by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing for a brief theatrical run before comes to Netflix on Sept. 30.
Though not directly topical or political, it’s a story that evokes the long history of U.S.-Mexico cross-border immigration through the experience of Sosa’s bi-national family.
The subject is the filmmaker’s grandfather, Julián Moreno, a man who holds that “Life is hard work,” and who puts his belief into practice. In his late ‘80s, he decided to build a cinderblock house next to his home in rural Mexico. His hope was that his extended family —seven children and their off-spring living on both sides of the border — could sometimes come and stay there after he was gone.
Previously, each month, Julián had taken a 560-hour bus ride from his home in rural Mexico to El Paso. But the bus company was concerned about his age. And, in any case, as Julián tells his filmmaker grand-daughter, he gets bored sitting around watching television in El Paso where the filmmaker’s mother lives.
We follow the gradual process of building the structure, overseen by Julián with a small construction crew, and his daily rituals. He lives next door with his nearly-blind middle-aged son, Jorge.
When working, he makes a mess of fried eggs for breakfast, swats flies with enthusiasm and, over the course of the movie, grows older and more frail. In quiet moments, he reminisces about his wife, who died at the age of 39 when Julián was 45, leaving him to raise his large family. For money, he took work across the border. He shows his grand-daughter the forged Alien Laborer’s Identification Card, his picture attached to a cousin’s name, which he used as a migrant worker in the 1960s.
Sosa, who shared cinematography duties with two other women, Judy Phu and Monica Wise, depicts a world of humble beauty, of sunrises and dogs and chickens and weed-strewn lots. With a measured pacing (the film was edited by co-writer Isidore Bethel), she has created a film that is more like an elegy than a simple chronicle of events.
What We Leave Behind. Directed by lliana Sosa. Written by Iliana Sosa and Isidore Bethel. Available on Netflix on Sept. 30.