2023 Fronteras Micro-film Festival

Borders structure life for billions globally. On the México-U.S. border, the capaciousness of the natural world — the boundless sky and desert — is but one vantage point revealing national borders as recent, artificial, and intrusive artifacts.

Dust Wave, an Albuquerque-based, majority Latinx film collective composed of immigrants and non-immigrants, is selecting short films (thirty seconds to three minutes) with themes of borders, enforcement, and surveillance, for festival screening based on creativity and thematic engagement, with special consideration for non-English films.

Selected films will be projected onto or screened within relevant immersive, interactive video installations. These installations speak to the border’s artificiality and dire consequences on human life and the natural world.

Some installations invoke unwanted stops in a migrant’s journey, including border walls, detention centers and trailer transport. Others conjure state surveillance apparatuses of cameras and guard posts. Still others engage the beauty and awe of the remaining untouched natural landscapes of the México-U.S. border.