Magic Valley [EXCERPT]

2025

31:10

MAGIC VALLEY is an atmospheric essay film which looks at the contested landscape of the Rio Grande Valley, a region rattled by migration and climate change, and cleaved apart by the ongoing construction of the separation wall dividing the US from Mexico. The film looks at the effects that border militarization, institutional surveillance and man-made development have had on one of the most diverse local ecologies on the planet, fighting for survival.

The camera roams wearily through the borderlands, silently observing the violence these crises have wrought. Masses of people and animals crisscross the Rio Grande by land and in the sky. We observe happenings along the river through a series of interconnected vignettes. Attempted migrant crossings, bird migration, ornithologists, conservationists, wildlife, border patrol agents, radio broadcasts, wall construction sites, and surveillance technologies are intercut with overheard fragments of conversation. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents who describe the procedural quality of their day to day work, perpetually circling around the river boundary. Simultaneously, conservationists from across the region describe the challenges of their efforts to protect the wildlife corridors from an increasingly hostile militarized atmosphere surrounding wall construction.

The film wades through a temporal space, where banality gives way to alienation, displacement and fear. The film asks who and what is permitted to move across a landscape whose borders have been imposed on it by humans, not nature. The land is the land no matter where the river bends.

Directed by Adam Golfer

Edited by Adam Golfer and Danya Abt

Sound Recordist: TJ Proechel

Color Grade: Cedric von Niederhausern

Sound Design & Mix: Luciana Foglio