De l'Autre Côté

It's an old story, yet renewed and more atrocious each day. Risking their lives, leaving everything behind, the poor make the move to the other side in the hopes of securing survival. But once there, they find they are not wanted for anything more than the lowest jobs that no one else wants to do. In this film, the “other side” is North America, and the poor are mostly Mexicans. Chantal Akerman gives these men, women and children the chance to tell their dramatic tales, which they do with surprising simplicity: their arrival from the south, their marginalized lives in the north, the few success stories among their ranks. With U.S. Marshals often hot on their trail, desperate immigrants risk death crossing the desert on foot to enter the United States illegally. De l'autre côté is an extremely lucid narrative, shot to provide strong visual impact, as in the sequences filmed along the wall that has been constructed in a stretch of U.S.-Mexican border.