Death is a fixture in the lives of Ely and Marisela Ortiz. For the past 12 years, the couple has spearheaded the Aguílas del Desierto (or “Desert Eagles”), a volunteer group that combs the arid terrain lining the U.S.-Mexico border in search of missing migrants who failed to make the perilous crossing. Year after year, thousands of people perish in this search for a new life. Most have fallen prey to fatigue or injury, left behind by their “coyote” (a slang term for the smugglers that offer safe passage at a high price tag) who cannot risk capture by Border Patrol. Ely and Marisela are called upon by distressed loved ones –– many of whom were expecting a hard-won reunion on American soil –– to track down these misplaced travellers, either to ensure their safety or, in most cases, recover their remains.
Director and editor Jonah Malak first happened upon their story in a newspaper photo essay. “Just from the two lines [of description] that I read, I thought that there’s such a dense story to be told here,” Malak tells POV. He reached out to the group in early 2020 and, after almost two years of lockdown-related impediments, spent three and a half more years immersed in the Aguílas’ ceaseless work. His film, Spare My Bones, Coyote!, which has its world premiere at Hot Docs, captures the harried domestic lives of the central pair (who cannot help but bring their work home with them) while it unfurls into a larger portrait of the crises that inform their every waking moment.
Malak was allowed access to the Ortiz home after building a sense of mutual collaboration and trust with the Aguílas, who went out of their way to accept and accommodate the film crew. “I roamed the desert with them. I slept at the camp, I slept in the hammock,” he remarks. “It’s not just us dropping in for a couple of hours, grabbing some images, getting a short interview and then leaving.” Scenes of the Aguílas at work are presented with little embellishment or intrusion, creating a sense of real-time tension that deliberately sidesteps trivialization. Malak attributes this to a cinéma vérité shooting style, with the camera crew “discovering the story as it unfolds.”
In the kitchen with the Ortizes, his camera observes them chopping vegetables while Ely talks to a panicked caller on a headset. Ely receives correspondences of this fretful tenor 30-40 times a day, and long into the night. In most cases, his facial expressions convey a careworn numbness, which Malak describes as a coping mechanism. “If you’re too happy or too sad during the day, usually you [get] a phone call that’s as desperate as the [ones] we hear in the movie. Being in a constant state of numbness helps him and the family process [the non-stop calls],” explains Malak. “You cannot sustain your work and your involvement over the years if you are constantly emotionally involved.” Ely’s decade-spanning mission to give closure to bereaved families stems from the formative loss of his brother and cousin, whose bodies he found himself. He relives this trauma every time he picks up the phone, and every time he finds another body.
Though his exposure came from the position of bystander and documenter, Malak –– who survived his fair share of horrors growing up in Lebanon during the civil war –– struggled in his own way to cope with the images he encountered over the film’s long shoot. “When we found the bodies in the desert, that was sometimes so emotional that I would be completely numbed two days later, [unable] to focus or to work,” he says. “The toll was very strong on us.
“The most difficult part was when we filmed in Mexico and were going from shelter to shelter and hearing the stories of the migrants firsthand, sitting with them and recording their testimony,” Malak continues. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back –– it was just so difficult to leave the shelter and go back to our hotel knowing that the people we [were] talking to [in Mexico] might be the same people we will be filming dead on the American border a couple of months later.”
Throughout Spare My Bones, Coyote!, bodies are glimpsed in long shots, fragmented inserts, or images of bones. Meanwhile, harrowing voice recordings from the deceased are set against images of cacti stretching toward the sky with bristled arms outstretched. Though Malak filmed hours of footage that showed human remains in horrible detail, he made the conscious decision –– for the sake of the families who’d signed releases and consent forms –– to remove any image that could sensationalize their tragic fates, or contain identifying features. “If I had gone through that or my family had gone through that, I’m not sure I would like to see my family member on the screen like that, even if I do ‘approve,’” he clarifies. In spite of this written approval, obtained during the search process for the bodies, the crew made sure to check in with the families multiple months later, “to make sure that the release was not signed in an emotional state, that they [weren’t just] confident in signing because they were overwhelmed by their emotions.”
This is not a story where happy outcomes are possible. The film’s concluding stretch contains one disheartening scene after another –– an outreach effort south of the border lands on resistant ears; a human skull is stashed away on a storage shelf alongside rows of others containing unidentifiable remains; Ely tends to his ailing parrot, revealing an unshakably caring nature; Ely and Marisela attempt to cast their “bad energy” out to sea; and on the same beach, a migrant is apprehended by Border Patrol, pushed into a van as the camera shakily pans back toward the wall from which he descended. “If you stay long enough on the border, you’re gonna see these kinds of events,” Malak says regarding this final moment. It’s an image that Malak describes as “pure accident – the ‘magic’ of documentary filmmaking.” It’s also a telling snapshot of an urgent crisis.
