Unwelcomed
(Chile, 68 min.)
Dir. Amilcar Infante & Sebastian Gonzalez Mendez
Programme: International Showcase (World premiere)
Venezuela has been undergoing a slow death over the last few decades, strangled by political corruption and financial disparity. The oil-rich country has struggled to find a balance between its claims for social justice and the explicit mismanagement of recent regimes. Things became even more untenable when the global COVID-19 pandemic deeply affected the region, exacerbating the situation and displacing an estimated eight million people in search of opportunities elsewhere.
Almost half a million of these Venezuelans made the torturous trek south, encouraged in part by welcoming messages from the government in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Arriving at the northern Chilean towns that share a border with Peru, migrants find that the locals are far less conciliatory. Unwelcomed pays witness to criminal activity, violence, and even murder tied to this wave of migrants.
It’s in this background of a massive population shift and all the related challenges that Amilcar Infante and Sebastian Gonzalez Mendez’s debut documentary sets its sights. With the desiccated surroundings, carefully composed drone shots, and a wide variety of perspectives illustrated, Unwelcomed provides a deft and journalistically assured look at the situation, albeit one that’s slightly undermined by its narrative looseness.
Unwelcomed marks a tricky prospect in a crowded field of docs about the global migration crisis. Far less ambitious titles are championed for their cinematic prowess while their focus is far less provocative or engaging. That’s not to say that Unwelcomed lacks craft, for its stunning visuals and careful compositional elements do elevate the task somewhat.
The challenge, unfortunately, is that this film really does feel comparable to focusing on a grain of sand in a vast desert, never quite delving sufficiently into the various elements at play, nor providing a wide enough context for those seeking out broader investigations. It’s almost as if we as viewers are like the abandoned structures that are sometimes home to these migrants along their journeys—slightly hollowed out building where things have come before, things will happen again, but we are in place waiting for it all to go by.
There are certain indulgences made with this kind of almost voyeuristic gaze, not simply leaning into vérité, nor fully situating audiences with a top-down perspective hinted at by the many drone shots. The result is a slightly askew glance at the situation with the migrants, seeing things after they’ve come to the head, not diving in deeply to the differing perspectives, only in brief glimpses hearing about the horrors of the journey to even get to Chile in the first place.
Despite its brisk running time, the film does seem to lag, never quite captivating a viewer in the way such an obviously rich human interest story should. Again, this is not to say the filmmakers needed to aggrandize the circumstances, and they respectfully avoid exploiting the impoverished to elicit more explicit emotional connections. Rather, it’s as if the film is a stone skimming across the water, never sinking too deep beneath the surface but quickly moving on to make a different ripple.
Even when things get quite kinetic, such as when we see footage captured by a photo journalist of protesters turning on migrants, it still feels as if that’s a place to stay and do a deeper dive, to find a stronger human connection. In such a story, where the magnitude overwhelms and the people reduced to mere statistics, there’s a potential need for those outside these environs to have something specific to be able to hang on to in order to more fully grasp the situation.
As such, Unwelcomed presents a profoundly important story let down slightly by its meandering formalism. Never quite able to settle on its gaze, the missteps are nonetheless overcome by the journalistic import. A more tightly structured film may have even given further importance to the compelling story that it seeks to tell.
