Faux Documentary and the Aesthetics of Migrant Death

We begin with Angie Bonilla’s paper entitled “Faux Documentary and the Aesthetics of Migrant Death,” which integrates film and literary studies to investigate how Marc Silver and Gael Garcia Bernal’s 2014 film Who is... [ view full abstract ]

We begin with Angie Bonilla’s paper entitled “Faux Documentary and the Aesthetics of Migrant Death,” which integrates film and literary studies to investigate how Marc Silver and Gael Garcia Bernal’s 2014 film Who is Dayani Cristal? foregrounds and aestheticizes the “faux documentary.” She argues that the film’s transformation of Central American migrant plight into an object of consumption and source of fabrication undercuts the project’s pro-immigrant and de-militarization politics. Bonilla then moves to consider the parallels between the Westernization of testimonio, a genre that came to symbolize the problem of brown poverty and violence, and the emergence of transnational documentary films aestheticizing migrant death. If testimonio allowed the subaltern to enter the realm of the literary, what does the migrant politically gain or lose by entering the realm of the documentary?

Panel 342