No.289 : Which Way Home (2009)

Which Way Home at the IMDb

It’s time for a documentary double bill here at the ‘W’ Movie Blog. Our regular reader will attest that we cover all genres here, except perhaps porno, with the odd documentary feature a nice change of pace from the usual westerns and people being hit in the balls in frat movies.

‘Which Way Home’ (No question mark) is an Oscar Nominated documentary from 2009 which follows several children as they try to illegally enter the United States. I thought most illegals were Mexicans, but most of the people we follow are from further afield in Central America - Honduras, El Salvador and the like. These people are dirt poor and the idealised images of the US they see on TV are a persuading force in making them take the perilous journey of hundreds of miles on the back of freight trains.

The main children we follow are Kevin and Fito who are both barely teenagers. We get a bit of background of their plight as well, with cutaways back to the family home where their families are interviewed. The first stage is to get into Mexico and that seems relatively easy. The Mexicans seem nice with locals offering the kids food and a government body helping with advice and medical aid.

The train companies don’t want them however, but are unable to do much as the freight wagons are festooned with dozens of riders. We meet several other travellers and hear horrific tales of rape and murder. The kids are pretty streetwise but clearly vulnerable and prone to tears.

We also follows some migrants who end up in detention or even dead. People smugglers are happy to abandon their charges and there is one terrible sequence where a poor family have to go bureaucratic hoops to get their son’s body back from the Arizona desert where he perished.

The film was pretty unflinching, but the spirit of the children and their desire to pursue a desperate dream was enough to make it a positive experience rather than a depressing one. The filmmaker did well to keep track of her subjects over a 2000 mile journey that must have taken weeks. The camera work was excellent too, with a lot of shots taken from between and on top of the freight cars.

They didn’t follow the ‘show don’t tell’ rule  as there were regular captions giving additional information about what we were seeing - usually horrific statistics. I liked  this and felt that I came out of the film having learned something rather than having just watched some poverty porn.

Captions at the end let us know how most of those followed fared and it largely wasn’t as how they would have wanted. No doubt things will be worse now, a decade later, and it would be interesting to see the same documentary today.

The film didn’t attempt to offer solutions, merely presenting a snapshot of a humanitarian crisis that has to be addressed. Clearly if their home lives were better there wouldn’t be any reason to leave but I doubt economics would ever allow that to happen.

This was an excellent documentary that offered a lot of food for thought. Next time you moan about your train being five minutes late, spare a thought for these guys.

Best Bit : The 9 year old girl was adorable, hope she made it.  20/23