Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana, Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow, is a Mexican immigrant filmmaker, cinematographer, and multimedia creator. His work intersects contemporary art, political documentary, and visual ethnography to explore themes of belonging and alienation in immigrant communities. His feature-length film Border South follows the migrant routes from southern Mexico to the U.S.-Mexico border. The result is a close-up, nuanced, and highly original view of the migrant experience, one fraught with risk and danger but also comradery, ingenuity, and humor. Border South had its world premiere at the 2019 Sheffield Doc/Fest in the U.K. Paz-Pastrana is a Princess Grace Awards Special Project Grantee, an Art Matters/Jerome Foundation Cassis France Arts Fellow, a Tribeca Film Institute All Access grant recipient, a 2018 IFP Filmmaker Labs fellow, a 2018-20 Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow, and a 2018-19 Ford Foundation, JustFilms grantee.
Select Work:
- Border South Trailer: A film that reveals immigrants’ resilience, ingenuity, and humor as it exposes a global migration system that renders human beings invisible in life as well as death. (Border South, 2019)
- Slow Train to U.S. Border Purgatory: The Guardian review of Border South. (Guardian, 2019)
- Interview with Border Criminologies of Oxford: An interview with a center dedicated to researching border control and its alternatives. (Border Criminologies, 2019)
