Five years in the making, BORDERLAND | The Line Within, from Award-Winning Director Pamela Yates, exposes the war waged on immigrants daily in the United States through a massive system of surveillance and a militarized border industrial complex. This well documented large scale human rights crisis is setting the stage for an entire class of people to live in fear of a carceral system that treats them as criminals. But the film’s protagonists, all immigrants themselves, are quietly building strength, their leadership emerging in the shadow of this border-industrial complex.
The film begins south of the U.S. border, following the story of Maya human rights defender Kaxh Mura’l, as he flees death threats for his uccessful resistance preventing mining companies from encroaching on ancestral lands. As his journey north unfolds, Kaxh meets Gabriela Castañeda and people from the Border Network for Human Rights. They share with Kaxh their mobilization of immigrants to organize, educate themselves and assert their constitutional rights, in spite of overwhelming odds.
The narrative thread that weaves BORDERLAND together is a group of PhD digital humanists, immigrants all, working underground at Columbia University in New York City, researching, scraping the web, and creatively visualizing the inner workings of the border-industrial complex. They ask and answer: Who is involved? What’s the money flow? Where are the many ICE detention centers that dot the country, far from the border itself? How is the fear of immigrants, characterized as the “other” used as a gateway to autocratic governance? And they reveal the exponential growth
ORDERLAND: THE LINE WITHIN, will have its Los Angeles theatrical premiere on October 4, at the Laemmle Glendale theater where the film will play for one week.