Night of the Coyotes review – border-crossing role-play is tourist attraction in struggling Mexican town

In contrast to other migration documentaries, which focus on the new life that awaits those who have crossed the border, Clara Trischler’s absorbing second feature trains its gaze on those who are left behind. The suspenseful opening plunges us into a whirl of familiar images: tense whispers in the dead of night as a ragtag group of people stumble, and even crawl, their way towards an unseen border. All of a sudden a blinding light intrudes, guns are fired in the air: a police car has arrived on the scene.

This terrifying sequence of events is later revealed to be make-believe. In the small Mexican town of El Alberto, whose population has been depleted by a steady flow of migration to the US, role-playing re-enactments function as both a means of deterrent and, oddly enough, a tourist attraction. Advertised as Caminata Nocturna – “night hike” in Spanish – these events recruit local residents to perform as specific characters, including the fearsome “coyotes”, AKA human traffickers. The attendees experience the full scale of a border-crossing operation, from being loaded on vans to intimidation from their coyotes, and police interrogation.

Observational in style, the film is oddly uninterested in the psychological impact as well as the ethical questions posed by these exercises. On one of these nocturnal outings, for example, a woman is casually picked to be a rape victim, with seemingly little information on what to expect. What Trischler does highlight well, however, is the collective grief that enshrouds El Alberto. From those who are sent back from the US to children separated from their parents, we hear personal stories dominated by the pain of separation. It is not just the border that stands between them, but also a world of missed experiences and emotional voids that can never be filled.