Raùl O. Paz Pastrana

Filmmaker, Mexico/US

Raùl is a Mexican-Immigrant filmmaker whose cinematic style melds visual anthropology with cinema verité. His films, which focus on indigenous and immigrant rights, have screened all over the world. He is a Princess Grace Awards recipient and a Tribeca Film Institute All Access Program recipient. Recently he was a fellow for the Film Society of Lincoln Center Artist Academy at the 2016 NYFF54 and received the 2017 Art Matters and Jerome Foundation Artist Residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Currently, Raúl is working on his first feature film "Border South". "Border South" melds ethnography and cinema-verité to explore the harsh physical environment and brutal journey of undocumented Central American immigrants crossing Mexico towards the United States.


More info: www.raulpazfilms.com

Border South

Raùl worked on post-production for his first feature film, Border South, which focuses on the U.S. government's efforts to deter undocumented Central American immigration by investing heavily in Mexican immigration enforcement.  This film explores the hardships and trauma that Central Americans face in their journey north, and seeks to provide immigrants themselves with a platform to tell their own stories in a way that recognizes characters’ own expertise, strengths, and talent. Raùl also worked on the development and research phase of an online-multimedia documentary project about U.S. detention and deportation practices in cooperation with the Detention Watch Network and American Friends Service Committee.  This project combined video, 360° virtual reality, travelogues, and short films to uncover the complex relationships that immigration detention centers create between communities, local officials, and undocumented/refugee immigrant populations.

Expanding on these projects, Raùl's career goals included undertaking an artistic body of work that will encompass a series of multi-media short films highlighting undocumented immigrant communities in the US, and completing a feature film trilogy about undocumented global immigration from Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Bay of Bengal (the place with most immigrants deaths in the world). Border South is the first film of the trilogy.  While at the residence in Cassis, France, Raùl conducted research, wrote a treatment and created the story-board for the second film of the trilogy about undocumented migration from Sub-Sahara Africa into Europe and the USA.  

Getting in the Train

Raùl was in residence at the Camargo Foundation from May 10 to June 11, 2017 with support provided by Jerome Foundation and Art Matters.