Borders (and all the politics attending the drawing of borders) exist to keep some people in (citizenship) and others out. This film is an attempt to capture the presence of people otherwise denied the political right to be at home in some place that is their home, where they have their roots, where they have their being.
Filmed in Rochina, Latin America’s largest shantytown.
Filmmaker Robert Fenz returned to the locations of three classic films made by the pioneering American ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner. Dead Birds (1964) was filmed in West Papua, Rivers of Sand (1974) in Ethiopia and Forest of Bliss (1986) in Varanasi, India. Correspondence is an elegy for a kind of imagemaking that is in the process of disappearing.
