A colorful ferris wheel slowly rotates, backed by a clear blue sky — a lovely view from an overlook above the Rio Grande.
“Up, up, up to Eagle Pass,” a little boy says in Spanish. “That way, this way,” he says, his bare feet shuffling along in the dirt toward the water. “That way, that way, that way, this way, through here, that way…” He points across the river.
So opens “The In Between,” the new film directed by Robie Flores, which is showing this week at the Bentonville Film Festival. As throughout the documentary, I found myself a bit unmoored, trying to get my bearings. Which side are we on? Turns out this is Piedras Negras, the sister city in Mexico across the river from Eagle Pass, the sleepy border town where Flores grew up. The towns are like separated twins, hard to tell apart at first glance for an outsider like me.
To journey to Piedras Negras from Eagle Pass is pretty simple, by driving or walking across a bridge that Flores says she “must have crossed…a million times.” Traveling in the other direction can be complicated, depending on who you are.
Eagle Pass has become ground zero for American political anxiety about the border. It is where Republican politicians like Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders fly in for photo ops and hot takes. Not long after Flores finished filming, Texas Gov. Greg Abbot spent a million dollars in taxpayer money on a barrier of buoys, an ugly orange intrusion in defiance of federal law that may have contributed to the drowning death of a migrant. Elon Musk showed up in Eagle Pass last fall to livestream and offer his impressions fresh off his private jet, wearing a massive cowboy hat that he mistakenly put on backwards.
For Flores, though, it is home. With her painterly eye for color, she depicts the border as a dreamlike space pulsing with naturalistic magic. A horse and its foal trot lazily along the Rio Grande; turtles dip up and below the surface; Matachines dance in vibrant costumes; the expanse of a Quinceanera dress poofs out like a flower in bloom; bedazzled girls prep for a child’s pageant at a stock show; the massive Mexican flag on the Piedras Negras side takes its cues from the wind.
The film is not overtly political, though it is impossible to see the wonders of this place through the loving and patient attention of Flores and not think of the contrast with the reductive platitudes of flyby demagogues. The complications of the border arrive organically in Flores’s depiction as details and asides. I was reminded of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels — the way that the happenings of the news and their political stakes hum in the background, overwhelmed by the texture of life. And isn’t it so? We have an ambient sense that world historical events near and far are of the utmost importance, but our own attention wanders most intensely back to the personal — our minor fears and joys are the major stuff of our days. Gossip, family, friends, parties, arguments, frustrations, anxieties, laughter, play. Up in the sky, the border patrol helicopters fly; down below, the kids play tag.
At 18, Flores says in voiceover, she was eager to escape Eagle Pass. But she returns home as an adult to point her camera at her old community, as a means not just of documenting the place but of recapturing the past. Her younger brother, Marcelo (also known as Mars — his English nickname, one of many doublings in the film) died at the age of 23 in 2016.
In a boat languidly floating along the Rio Grande, Flores says that the place reminds her of her late brother. They had always planned to make movies together. Her camera lingers on a dragonfly. “I’m pretty sure [that’s Mars],” she says.
And so she comes back to Eagle Pass not to make a movie about the border, though “The In Between” is that, too. She comes back for the impossible: To make a movie with her brother who is not here, pointing wistfully like the boy in that opening scene toward a border she cannot cross.
***
Flores’s documentary, her debut feature, is a memoir piece at heart, with voiceover throughout trying to sort through her feelings about Mars and her return home — often alongside slow-panned images or a series of nearly still shots, mixing natural beauty and quotidian peculiarity. She is an obsessive and unhurried noticer, in a way that recalls the documentary filmmaker Les Blank, or perhaps the visual meanderings of “The Night of the Hunter” or Terrance Mallick.
The film is achingly self-conscious — we often see Flores with her camera in a mirror, or her shadow in the light. But if her mission is to recover memories as a means of reaching connection or catharsis with Mars, her technique is to look outward. Interspersed with her voiceover and her lovingly crafted visual odes to the place are slice-of-life scenes from both sides of the border.
These scenes are focused on youths of all ages: little kids frolicking through the grass or high schoolers getting ready for graduation. Boys chat about dreams and play football, girls give each other makeovers or dancing lessons. Kids string up white and blue balloons in the street, teenagers plot to sneak around and party. Occasionally we are aware of the filmmaker’s presence but these brief vignettes are mostly done in cinema verite style, with no obvious narrative connection between them: intimate moments of kids being kids.
Flores says in voiceover that she is desperate to access memories as a means of being with Mars again, but cannot retrieve them to her satisfaction. Her parents didn’t do much documenting with film or video, and they weren’t the types to keep mementos like childhood journals or drawings. In filming kids in Eagle Pass, then, she seems to be hoping she can conjure her own childhood. And find Mars.
I initially found the film quite beautiful and tender but so lilting and leisurely in its opening sequences that I almost worried it would float away. But about 20 minutes in there’s a jolt: Flores discovers a hard drive containing a treasure trove of Mars’s own slice-of-life snippets he had filmed over the last few years of his life. Suddenly we are watching the collaborative film Robie Flores had dreamed of — fractured and incomplete, but nevertheless artifacts of Mars’s own passionate noticing, his own buoyant eye and filmic instincts.
And then another jolt: Flores asks her brother, Alex, a co-producer on the film, to join her in Eagle Pass and help her shoot.
Alex and Mars were identical twins. As with Robie, we periodically see Alex with his camera. And so the specter of Mars haunts the film in a viscerally intense way: We are aware of his absence and his ghost, yet he is present in the body of his twin and in the filmed images of him from the past.
That same feeling of uncanny doubleness that seems to mark life at the border and fronteriza culture becomes increasingly powerful in the film: It’s hard to tell which side of the border we’re on, it’s hard to tell whether we are seeing an image of Alex or Mars, it’s hard to tell whether the footage was shot by Robie and Alex or by Mars. Likewise with language, as everyone moves constantly between English and Spanish, with the switching between them presumably following some logic that I cannot reckon. Among the many dreamy and uncanny feelings I had watching the film, I found that my brain was confused taking in the subtitles, which are in both English and Spanish: Sometimes I was accidentally focused on reading, or listening, when I should have been doing the reverse in order to follow along.
Flores is clearly comfortable in the folkways and language of the border, but her brother’s death seems to have left her likewise adrift in the hazy boundaries in between, awkwardly attuned to the presence of the living and of the dead.
She has always had incredibly vivid dreams, she says. When she wakes up, it takes her a moment to figure out what’s real. After Mars’s death, she was scared to go to sleep. She did not want to dream of him, and then wake up — forced to bear the shock and grieve anew.
***
Elias Canetti, a Jewish writer who fled Vienna and the Nazis in 1938, settled in England and eventually won a Nobel Prize. Among his works were a series of memoirs based on the senses — though five volumes were planned, he wrote just three: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes. The memoirs cover his life until 1937, and then stop. Not coincidentally, this was the year that his mother died.
Canetti devoted a substantial portion of the rest of his artistic life to a kind of rebellion against the fact of his mother’s death. He would write down every detail of her life, he promised himself, record every memory, and in so doing create once again something akin to her life. “Where is her shadow?” he wrote. “Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.” The project became a rebellion against death altogether. He filled the pages of his notebooks with aphorisms and half-baked notions, a poetic prosecution against mortality. “I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me,” he wrote, and so he did, over the course of more than five decades and two thousand pages. He called it The Book Against Death.
I thought of Canetti while watching “The In Between.” In one poignant scene, Flores reads through Mars’s journal, something she’s mostly avoided doing for the two years she’s had it. “I’m scared not to have new things to learn and discover,” she says.
Documentary filmmaking is a preservation project of sorts, making archives of moments that might otherwise be lost. Flores’s quixotic hope as she narrates her film is that the archives can restore life itself. It doesn’t work that way, of course. It is not memories or mementos we crave when someone is gone, but rather their otherness, what C.S. Lewis called their “resistance” in his book A Grief Observed. We do not just want to hear their voice, or see their face. Memories and even videos are pale facsimiles. We want them to surprise us, to baffle us with the foreignness of their subjectivity. We want their unexpectedness. The dead may linger in many ways, but not in the way we crave. They are not guided by their own private motivations; if they speak or move, it is only through our own curation, like frames of film cut to our own devices.
In voiceover, Alex gently suggests to his sister that she may never be satisfied. But she may find something else, some other means of connecting to Mars.
Canetti’s book, by the way, was never finished. I’m not sure what it would even mean to finish such a book. After all, he died. But it was compiled into an abridged volume by his German editors in 2014, and is forthcoming in English translation for the first time this August. If you’ll indulge me, this stunning passage could be an epigraph of sorts for “The In Between”:
I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the greatgrandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.
He wrote that in June 1942, when of course lots of people were dying, and lots of Jews less lucky than Canetti were being rounded up for slaughter. But death is different when it’s close. As with “The In Between,” the stakes of history and politics are whispering in the background.
There is no writing or filming death away. The next best thing, perhaps, is to nurture the texture of life. “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration,” the novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote. “You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?” Or as Vladimir Nabokov supposedly told his students: “Caress the details, the divine details.” Good advice for filmmakers, or writers, or maybe just anyone living the life we’re curiously gifted.
“Appreciate everything,” Mars wrote in his journal. “Welcome the good. Welcome the ‘bad.’” Flores initially frets that she’s doing it wrong, that while Mars was filming as an expression of joy and a means of being present, she is doing so in an anxious attempt to guard against losing memories or a mechanism to hide from her own insecurities behind the camera. But as the film progresses, if there is no neat resolution, the simplicity of Mars’s advice emerges as an aphorism Flores can hold to: Not a film against death, but a film for life.
The way that Robie and Mars, and Alex too, pay attention to the world: There is a humane affirmation in their noticing and their insistence on the splendor of moments. Robie Flores sees a squirrel lounging on the power line and pauses to observe with her camera; Mars Flores had a knack for capturing gentle movements in water, caused by raindrops or romping feet. Cameras fool us into thinking we can hold on to memories like trusty possessions — even the verb “to capture” an image indulges in this fantasy. But perhaps what Flores is chasing is not memory but the beat by beat of life in the hypervivid present tense. I won’t spoil the ending, but the film concludes with a kind of celebration of moments — not catharsis exactly, but a deeply earned emotional beauty that I found breathtaking.
And in this way, the film is political after all. Here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Eagle Pass, reciting talking points that were no doubt written before she arrived. There are so many other stories she could tell, if she only had a little willingness to see.
***
Films are screening this week at the Bentonville Film Festival through Sunday, June 16. The festival, celebrating its 10th anniversary, kicked off on Monday night with an opening reception featuring festival chair Geena Davis. The lineup this year includes more than 75 feature films and more than 50 shorts. “The In Between” will show at 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 13 at the Skylight Cinema at 350 Southwest A St., with the filmmakers in attendance. Single tickets available for $15. See here for more ticket and festival pass information.