Berlinale Dispatch. 2.

As always, there are themes that dominate a film festival like the Berlinale. One theme that hasn't gone away after years of examination is the border and the movement across it.

The Infinite Border looks at immigration to the United States through the Mexican border, where politicians have been going for the last few years to condemn illegal entry into the country and to call for the construction of a fence to keep "them" out. Juan Manuel Sepulveda is looking specifically at migration from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua through Mexico to the southern US border. These are immigrants who abused by Mexicans before they have a chance to be abused by Americans. And still they come.

Most of what Sepulveda is tracking is travel by train, which takes the migrants along routes that were put in place in the 19th century, and the rickety lines pass through remote parts of these countries. It's usually a single track, often with vegetation coming right up to the rails. The trains are all for freight, but people climb on them by the hundreds. The migrants use tree branches that they have broken off for shade, so it looks as if trees are growing on the railroad cars themselves. It beats walking, which is how they would head north otherwise.

The travelers are mostly young men - although there are some women - and many of the men have made this trip at least part of the way before. Many talk of being robbed by Mexican police who know that they have money for the journey. The journey itself is enough of an institution that dormitories to house the men who have been stopped along the way have been built and staffed with people who call their families to come and get them. It doesn't stop the flow.

Another institution, if you can call it that, is the growing population of disabled migrants who have lost limbs when they fell off the moving trains, and lost their lives when they fell under those trains. We see quite a number of them, living in wheelchairs along the route, as if this is completely normal. One of them, who has lost an arm and at least one leg, still talks of entering the US illegally to work. Hopes die hard.

Sepulveda's film ends as you might imagine it would, with a train heading north. In earlier scenes, he visits the border to witness the construction of part of the fence that the US is building to control immigration. Like the migrants' journey, there is an element of the Myth of Sisyphus here. Just as the migrants repeat the march to the border endlessly, until they cross it, the United States builds the wall which will have to extend endlessly - infinitely, as the title of Sepulveda's film suggests - for the barrier to work at all. And we know that it won't stop the migrants. But it will rally those who resent them.

Another wall built on resentment figures in Sharon, the new documentary about the Israeli leader by Dror Moreh, a filmmaker who had remarkable access to the right-wing former general for some six years before Sharon's illness in 2006. Moreh focuses on what those who distrusted Sharon still begrudgingly concede to be his greatest achievement - the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. Sharon was seen by his reactionary constituency, who supported his murderous war in Lebanon in the early 1980s, to have betrayed his closest allies. Still, Moreh shows us, he stuck to his guns (a pun that undercuts its own imagery here) and made at least a step toward peace, which also involved recognizing that Palestinians could rule themselves.

Sharon suffered a stroke in 2006, and there hasn't been much movement toward peace since, no thanks to George W Bush, who supported another Israeli intrusion into Lebanon in the summer of 2006, and who didn't achieve much more than creating traffic jams on his recent visit to Jerusalem. We see Bush and a smiling Condoleezza Rice talking (with all of Rice's signature insincerity) about how getting to know Sharon was getting to know the real man beneath all that flesh and all that accumulated blood. Clearly the filmmaker feels the same way. Sadly, he's probably right. The best hopes for peace in the Middle East, and they weren't much, died with Sharon after the coma that followed his stroke. And in place of peace, we have a wall separating the two populations.

Moreh does not address Sharon's views on the future of the Israeli economy or anything else domestic, and doesn't touch the scandals that were all over the Israeli press. He noted that Sharon was cleared of all charges. If this isn't enough for you, and even Moreh in the discussion after his film's premiere admitted that it shouldn't be, there is always the documentary by Avi Mograbi, How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997), in which Mograbi follows the large man around Israel in the hope of getting an interview with him. Maybe Sharon knew that history's judgment would be complicated.

Posted by dwhudson at February 10, 2008 7:45 AM