Adriana Trujillo’s earnest documentary Félix: Autoficcionesde un traficante (roughly translated to Felix: Self Fiction of a Smuggler) details the life of a man who has become an expert at illegally transporting people across the Mexican border. It premiered yesterday at the 2012 Hola Mexico Film Festival. In 2005, he started acting in a series of videos, some of which borrowed from his life as a migration dealer (Pesadilla Americana being one of them). He prides himself on the manner in which he conducts his activities, the dreams in which he helps facilitate, as well as the financially struggling U.S. veterans he hires. Over the course of the film, we learn that the stories Félix Rosales tells as an actor exists within the moral ambiguous world of his primary trade, each one feeding the other.
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| Moderator and Adriana Trujillo before screening of Félix at 2012 Hola Mexico Film Festival |
Rosales escorts Trujillo around a typical job and unreservedly shows her the tricks of the trade. Like a gopher outwitting a cat, he finds and exploits the holes in border security. He insists that his main motivation for agreeing to do the film was to show audiences that he does right by what he does, despite the illegality. In a business filled with less reputable traffickers, he takes care of his clients and provides them as much comfort and assuredness as he can. He also claims to want people to know what is going on, holding back no secrets. This documentary should come with a spoiler alert, as a film like this could and probably will become (if it hasn’t already) a tool for INS to crack down on illegal immigration. Rosales fully recognizes the nature of his actions and harbors the hope that the documentary will lead to some kind of greater change. My more cynical side suggests that he, indeed, is too good for this world, as wherever his intentions lie may not be the direction his indiscreet decision takes him, yet he remains ready to embrace whatever the results are. At the Q & A afterwards, the director acknowledged the extremely precarious position she was in by telling this story. By exposing the willing Rosales, his future is uncertain at this point.
This is Trujillo’s first feature length documentary. She initially employs interviews with acting colleagues spliced with footage of Rosales’ exploitation-style videos. As well, she employs graphics, time-lapse photography, and impresses upon the dry dessert landscapes juxtaposed next to the tense uncertainty of crossing border stops at night. While she sometimes overreaches in her grandiose images, there’s a poetry to her choices none-the-less. The most memorable images are from one of Rosales' videos projected onto his body while he stands in front of a screen, as well as the final gradually sweeping aerial shot of the U.S./Mexican border. Rather ironically, from a distance, the homes and life of those just south of the divide look more inviting and appealing than the barren Tijuana River Reserve areas that lie on the American side.
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