Un Mundo Raro
SD and HD Video
Experimental Documentary
6:45 minutes
2013


Un Mundo Raro is the title of one of José Alfredo Jiménez' greatest songs, which includes the line, 'when they ask about your past, say you come from a strange world where you've never known love or sorrow.' Most of this material was shot on the US/Mexico border during a series of trips from 2004 - 2008, with additional footage documenting the drug war taken from the web (noted in the Credits). Propelled by an indie rock song (RadTimesXpress, Courtesy of Drag City Records), fast paced scenes of high-stakes public life explore several themes: family, immigration, ecology, economics, the brutality of poverty and the drug trade. The relationship between image and sound is the inverse of my 2004 film, El Otro Lado, in which human voice and nature recordings carry the narrative while the border wall provides a relentless visual.

"An eco-feminist take on the border,"
Norma E. Cantú, Murchison Professor of Humanities at Trinity University and award-winning author of Canícula, Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera

"I am moved in so many ways ... I can't get it out of my head."
Refugio Romo, author of El Puente/The Bridge and The Border Is Burning
© Anne Wallace 2021