Blu-Ray BD50 / 1080p / 24fps / Region ABC
RRP: £19.99
Release Date: 30 January 2023
SRBD 057
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Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki's El Mar La Mar is a moving portrait of life and death in the US-Mexico border region, a sensorily immersive, captivating and terrifying journey through the Sonoran Desert. The film weaves harrowing personal accounts of border crossings with the cruel rhetoric of the politicised American media, accompanied by striking footage of desert life and the remnants left behind by animals and people.
Intense and mythic, and utilising a rich polyphonic soundtrack to create a vivid exploration of the desert habitat, El Mar La Mar is an experience like nothing you’ve seen, heard or felt before.
Presented from a new HD transfer approved by the filmmakers, El Mar La Mar makes its world premiere on Blu-ray. Our region-free edition also features a brand new appreciation of the film by writer, curator and producer Gareth Evans, and a booklet with new writing by Patrick Gamble.
• Presented from a new HD transfer approved by directors Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki.
• An exclusive newly-filmed appreciation by writer, curator
and producer Gareth Evans.
• Trailer.
• 16-page booklet with a new essay by film writer
Patrick Gamble.
• Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and Dual Mono 2.0 audio
• World premiere release on Blu-ray.
Directed by Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki
Cinematography, Editing, Sound, Sound Design,
Producers - Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki
More documentary and experimental
cinema is also available on Second Run
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2017 Berlin International Film Festival
Winner: Caligari Film Award
2017 Dokufest Kosovo / Winner: Best Film
2017 Curitiba International Film Festival / Winner: Best Film
2017 BFI London Film Festival / Official Selection
2017 New York Film Festival / Official Selection
"Monumentally important protest art. [...] It strives to unearth what the desert so conveniently wipes away: untold stories of sacrifice and struggle” Glenn Heath Jr, Little White Lies
“An unsettlingly topical portrait of the American southwest...
El Mar La Mar plays more like a horror film than an exercise in journalistic nonfiction” Jordan Cronk, Sight and Sound
“One of the top 10 films of 2017... cinema and landscape come together as sites of inscription marked by an encounter between the human and nonhuman” Erika Balsom, ArtForum
“Bonnetta and Sniadecki’s film stands out because it allows one of the most politicized terrains in the world to speak for itself” Philip Oltermann, The Guardian
“This landscape essay of spectral beauty... an unforgettable experience [...] a powerful antidote to both the sensationalism of media portrayals of migrant border crossings and the mirage-like frontier mythology of the desert as a vast expanse of possibility” Sophia Satchell Baeza, Sight and Sound
“This immersive, sensorially complex movie evokes the terrifying disorientation and loneliness of migration...
The result is simultaneously elusive and concrete: abstract cinema that packs a punch”
The New York Times
“Their stunning collaboration is a mystical, folktale-like atmosphere dense with the remains of desire, memories and ghosts” Harvard Film Archive