The towering, rust-colored, steel bollard border wall framed the glowing, singing face of Selena on a recent spring night in Nogales.
Two back-to-back screens, one on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border all that splits the city, played a documentary about the late Tejano music icon Selena Quintanilla. The film, “Selena y Los Dinos: A Family’s Legacy,” lit the faces of people on both sides of the border last week at the Nogales International Film Festival’s Film on the Fence event.
“Our kind of metaphorical goal is to erase the border through the power of film,” said festival managing director Francisco Landin.
The border wall has remained an important political symbol for President Donald Trump since his first presidential campaign. A decade later, and more than a year into his second term, border security remains a major pillar of Trump’s agenda. But even as the wall grows longer, the Nogales International Film Festival aims to bring the two sides together through cinema.
This year, the HDMI cord festival organizers used to connect the two screens through the gaps in the wall would need to be cut, rather than rolled back — a consequence of new barbed wire on the U.S. side.
“Barbed wire just came up,” Landin said. “They’ve been installing it for the past couple of months. So it’s bigger now, the wall looks bigger.”
Border wall expansion over the past year has gone far beyond new barbed wire. Last year, the Trump administration awarded billions of dollars worth of contracts for border wall construction and security enhancements on the U.S.-Mexico border.
On the Arizona-Sonora border, government contractors are working on new sections of wall in remote areas, like the San Rafael Valley east of Nogales, even as migration hits record lows.
“People see things and believe things about the border, and to the people that live here on the border, none of that really matters,” Landin said.
Life in Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona — together often called Ambos Nogales, or Both Nogales — is fluid. People cross the border daily by car and on foot to go shopping, visit family and even work.
Nogales, Sonora, filmmaker Areth Montoya was born and raised in this border community. His short film, “Audrey,” is one of the more than 100 films that make up the festival. But not all of them were screened on the wall.
Montoya has seen the film community in Nogales, Sonora, take root the past few years, in part thanks to the festival.
“What we’re trying to do is give visibility to our stories apart from the border,” Montoya said. “It’s much more than drug trafficking and violence. …There’s art and many artistic people.”
Other filmmakers came from far away to participate in the festival and have their films screened on the wall.
David Alvarado is the director of “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez,” a documentary about the Chicano movement pioneer and screenwriter known for the play “Zoot Suit” and movie “La Bamba.”
“It’s not a very welcoming image,” Alvarado said of the border wall. “But the fact that there is a film being projected onto it — that is a very powerful, striking counterbalance.”
Back at the showing of “Selena y Los Dinos,” a young Selena sings in a home video as the credits roll.
The two audiences, one on either side of the wall, clap together.
“This is just a reminder of something we already know.” Landin said. “We already know that we’re the same people across a giant metal border as if the metal border wasn’t there. These are just reminders of who we are as human beings. And that’s really what we want to portray.”
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