"I always thought the concept of balance in the media a total falsity" - Documentarian Marc Silver on "Who is Dayani Cristal?"

Who is Dayani Cristal? is a documentary that tells the story of the journey of a Honduran migrants to the Mexican boarder. Its starting point, however, is the remains and decaying corpses of these migrants found along the Arizona desert. A very powerful and thought provoking work by Marc Silver, which was presented at the 58th Cork Film Festival that reveals a more human side of a usually heavily politicised subject.

 

How did you come across the subject?

We launched this website and we asked people to send us stories about resistance against barriers, economic divisions, rich and poor. One of the stories that came in was the discovery of skeletons in the desert of Arizona and I remember seeing the picture of a policeman holding a skull in the desert in a very Shakespearean kind of way. It just made me question ‘what can that one skull reveal to you about the world, about systems, economics, human rights?’ So I looked at it and I thought if you backtracked and found out who that person was, then you could reveal the bigger picture behind it.

 

 

This particular story is explored in three different ways intertwined with one another. There is the narrative, which explored the journey, the investigation, which tries to discover who this one man was, and then there is the interviews with the victim’s family and close friends. Is that a structure you always had in mind?

We shot the documentary part first, the discovery of the family and the return of the body home. Then we worked out what Gael Garcia Bernal’s role in the story would have been. We always had this idea of the body coming from north to south intercut that with the living side of the story as he travelled from south to north. Also, as part of my research I interviewed a lot of specialists on immigration, migration and economics in Mexico and the US but I wasn’t interested in having those types of voices in the film. I wanted to have just the voices of the people that had come across his body or that knew him when he was alive. Some people have criticised the film for not having an anti-immigrant voice in the film, but that voice is loud and clear in the US anyways and didn’t interest me at all. For me it was literally about giving voice to people who had their voice taken away and are lying dead in the morgue because of a system that pushes them through the desert.

 

 

So the politically correct is always a problem.

Yes, even when dealing with death.

 

 

In fact, the great thing about about Who is Cristal Dayani is that it tells that side of the story that you never hear about.

Yeah, all of the big politics around those subjects that are sensitive like immigration, they’re never from the perspective of the people on the other side of the border, or the underdog. The people that have the loudest voices are the people who are essentially part of that media system anyways. And I always thought the concept of balance in the media a total falsity. The power of telling that story through the humans involved in the story was more interesting to me than that so called balanced approach.

 

 

There is a split in the mood of the film; the piece that directly deals with the journey has this naturalistic positive feel.

We were very aware that the film is not an easy film. A lot of it is set in the morgue and a lot of it is with the friends and family who are obviously hugely emotional about their loss. There is a strong sense of adventure, comradery, hope, inspiration and aspiration for people who are beginning to make that journey. Not only did we need that stylistically and narratively. We needed something to juxtapose the very hard core, cold morgue side of the film. But very naturally, when you’re travelling through that part of the world, even though death is present culturally, it’s dealt with in an opposite way to what we see in the morgue, so it’s full of life, colour, smell, sounds and music. And obviously Gael is from that side of the world and he could do that and get near that a hundred thousand times better than I could, because he is from that country. So even in the edit room we were always aware that we wanted to get those two feelings across, because they are both parallel but real and you can’t have one without the other. Also, it would have been too relentless to have that side of that story.

 

 

By leaving that side out you also would have been unfaithful to the character and his own feelings setting off on that journey.

Yes, and after talking to so many of these migrants I remember going back to my friends in London and telling them ‘there’s no difference’. I’ve often thought of me and my friends leaving home, getting on top of trains, crossing deserts and thinking out of our personalities, what would that journey have been like! Who would have been funny, who would have been scared, who would have been brave. And I think that just because people are iconically labelled as outsiders or migrants – at the end of the day, if I was in that same situation and needed to leave home I’d hope I would do it with a bunch of friends, and I’d hope we would survive. I guess what we were doing by showing that was also trying to stay away from the iconography of the immigrant and bring out the human side to it.

 

 

Was there a script?

The whole thing was improvised. We knew where we would be shooting but aside from that, nothing was scripted and all the migrants that were there were real. So we were telling them not to mind us and to be as real as they would be.

 

 

How did Gael Garcia Bernal get involved in the film?

He was involved from the start when we launched this website. Me and Gael had worked together on four shorts for Amnesty in Mexico called The Invisibles. That was looking at the human rights abuses of migrants travelling from Mexico so, some of the elements we had previously visited the year before. So it was a combination of him being politically active in this story but also this super-intense experience of Amnesty related human rights films about migrants. 

 

 

Do you think his presence in the film will help raise awareness?

Regardless of this film, Gael gives a shit about the issue of migration between Mexico and the US and also how Central American migrants are treated in Mexico. I never felt like he was in any way inauthentic and I think we really tried not to have him play this big character within his scenes and in a way he would learn from the migrants in whatever situation we were in. Through his learning, we as an audience get to experience it. I hope in a non-cynical way that brings more attention to an issue that blatantly is being ignored.

 

 

One of the final shots of the wall is very powerful. Also, the man’s brother says something in the end that is quite haunting about the States spending so much money on a wall that is inanimate instead of humans.

Yes, and again that didn’t come from a university specialist, it came right from the DNA of the story. I found it very interesting to know that not many people know that there is a wall going across the whole US boarder.

 

 

The people that you interviewed identify themselves as poor and they know they are not given a say in this issue, but still come across as being very deep about the issue.

Totally. And wise. And you just know that what they say has come from personal experience not from some academy university speech.

 

 

But then of course, you do show the remains of these bodies and when you use such shocking images, there is always that problem of slipping into exploitation. How do you restrain that?

In the moment of shooting I was very aware of that. Recovering bodies and skeleton and then going to the morgue for every other day for a month or so. It was an extraordinary powerful experience, and I was on my own during that journey. There are so many levels to me. On the one hand, because I had made that journey through Mexico and done those films for Amnesty I knew what that journey was and I knew that these skeletons were real living breathing people that had made that same journey. So what I wanted to do was giving voice to the voiceless, let these people speak beyond their graves. On the other hand, there is a huge amount of footage that didn’t make it into the film much more visually horrific of remains than we see in the film. During the edit it was a very fine line between what felt like…not even exploitation but almost like you’re slapping your audience on the face. There’s one shot of a very burnt body, from the sun, with a gold ring still on it. As horrific as that shot is, the meaning of that gold ring made me feel like that shot wasn’t exploitative. I’m sure someone else would have a totally different opinion, but that was all processed.

 

 

In a similar way, there is a risk becoming intrusive especially when dealing with the man’s family and close friends. So, how do you deal with that in talking to them? Or were they even open and willing to share their story?

The family was amazing and I feel we were very lucky because of all the thousands and thousands of families we could have coincidentally come across they were absolutely fantastic. From the very beginning we told them that we weren’t going to pay them but we asked them what they wanted. They took about a year to figure out what they wanted and they came back with two things. One was a new water system for the village, which is around 50,000 dollars. The other thing was improving the school. So, we needed to raise 150,000 dollars to make that happen and so far we have raised about 80,000, which is fantastic. The other thing was that from the beginning I said to them that it would be about their family member and how would they feel about his story about his story being spread all around the world. His story will provide a metaphor for all the other migration stories all over the world much like the Mediterranean is the equivalent of their desert, with North Africans drowning or Indonesia and Australia. And they totally got that, as you can see from the way they replied to some of those questions. Although it was about his story, it was also about this much bigger systemic problem. I told them to use me as the camera to get it all out and show what it really means to lose someone because of political reasons and decisions that are made thousands of miles away that you don’t have any power to affect but that have caused this tragedy in your family. So once we had that conversation there was no risk of exploitation. Also, we gave them a final cut before we started showing it to check that they didn’t want anything change.

 

 

I would add to that that the film is also not patronising.

Very few families in the States think about anything other than the boarder. They think that the story begins and ends with that wall. They think that there’s millions of people just waiting to walk over the border and get into the US. They have no sense of the scale of the journey before they get anywhere near the desert.

 

 

Of course, there is a whole initiative behind the film.

We’ve basically built relationships with all these different foundations and NGOs and activists who we have slowly been showing the film to for the last year from Honduras, Mexico and the States. We have basically been asking them how they would like to use the film. From that we will be launching a website next year that kind of complements the film, a website that really digs around the subject with videos and essays, photography, all the extras and research that we did for the film. Also, when we will be releasing the film on iTunes we will be making this iBook to go with it that matches all the scenes in the film. We’re also talking to the Honduran government to show this film to the kids in school there so that the next generations will be aware of the dangers of the journey. We’re working with NGO’s with mothers who take this train and raise awareness about their missing sons. So they all carry the film with them. Also, we’re working with groups on the border because they put water on all known routes along the desert. We’re also looking at labour demand in the US. So an all different frequencies we have built this platform that accompanies all the issues in the film.

 

 

As a final question, you have lived this situation and you must have come up with some personal conclusions about this issue. What do you think should be done about it? Is it as easy as one would hope?

You know what, I guess at the beginning I would have liked to have thought that there was a solution I would perhaps suggest, but what I have come to quickly realise is that it is a systemic and transnational problem. You can’t just blame the US for their immigration policy – although there is a lot to blame. You can’t just blame the Honduran economy for not having a stable economy. You can’t just blame the Mexicans for the dangers of their journeys and their kidnappings. All of these things are deeply interconnected and unfortunately I don’t believe that we are at a stage or a phase where any of these things will be solved. I don’t mean to sound negative, but at best you can tackle some of those points at the same time, so development at home would mean that maybe less people would need to migrate North. Awareness in the US and maybe develop this idea that you need to take care of the situation as a cleaner of a gardener would cut your roses in the back garden.  Knowing that when you go shopping all those fruit and vegetables were picked by those people because the US industry relies on cheap labour. There are so many of these little things that need to be solved before there can be enough momentum to shift this systemic problem. The more we understand that these issues are not single issues we might come up with multi-disciplinary options but for now we are a long way off.