When she was a kid living in Juarez in Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, Oscar contending director Jacqueline Baylon’s mother would sometimes try to get the family across the border.
“Lots of people were migrating to the United States and she decided that we would do that. It was hard. We got deported a couple of times, but then came right back.”
In those days, a smuggler would charge maybe “60 bucks” to get you across (as opposed to the thousands you’d have to pay today). On one crossing, her mother went on an inflatable tube while she was carried by ‘the coyote.’
“He had big boots and so was able to walk across. He knew the places in the river that were deep enough for him to walk through…even if you’re very young, it’s hard to forget a memory like that.”
Now, many years later, Baylon has directed and produced the Oscar-qualifying short documentary, Until He’s Back, a story about immigrants. The main subject is Ahmed Tchiche, a Moroccan whose son Yahya died at sea trying to get to Spain. Ahmed wants to bring the son’s body home so he can be given a proper send-off – but this is not an easy process at all.
Baylon is a journalist who specialises in stories about civil rights and immigration. “When immigration is covered, it isn’t always covered with the best intentions. And when it is covered, a lot of the focus is on the numbers…”
Baylon, who divides her time between the US and Madrid, where her partner, a journalist for the New York Times is based, was shocked to discover that Spain (“a country we think about as tapas and beach vacation”) had such a huge immigration crisis.
In Until He’s Back, the director achieves extraordinary access to many of those involved in Yahya’s tragic story – lawyers, morticians and family members.
“It actually started with Martin [Zamora], the mortician. He is well known in southern Spain and northern Africa as the guy who has been doing this for 20 years, focusing on migrants who are found on beaches and then trying to get access to the families and return the bodies,” Baylon explains.
Baylon had read a profile of Zamora and tried to contact him. At first, thanks to earlier encounters with the media, he was a little wary. “I would just take him out to coffee and try to explain what my goals were with this film. I think I was very persistent in going down there without a camera and not wanting anything in return other than to get to know to him.”
Through Zamora, Baylon met other contacts, for example Faisal Bouhafs, a Moroccan immigrant living in Spain, and María Ángeles Colsa Herrera, who runs an agency for the identification of missing migrants. She began travelling regularly to Morocco.
“Faisal introduced me to a lot of families [in Morocco].”
During one of her trips, Baylon received a call from María telling her that three bodies had been washed ashore. One of the dead men was Yahya. That was when she began to spend time with Yahya’s grieving father, Ahmed.
“With Ahmed, it was really magical the connection I had with him once I was able to explain through Faisal what my intentions were. I think he was in a lot of pain. This was one way he was able to show what he was going through. I think he just saw the injustice of it all. He didn’t understand what his son had done and didn’t understand how long this process was going to take.”
It was to take him many months to get Yahya back.
The film features one especially haunting sequence when other Moroccan fathers hold up pictures of their missing children to the camera.
“This was a small village where all the young men aged 16 to early 30s had literally all left one night and hadn’t been found. Their fathers had been looking [for them] for over a year. I think they had been willing to talk to anybody who was open to talk.”
After one of the fathers showed a picture of his son, it was “like a domino effect.” The other fathers started sharing the images too. “This was an opportunity for them to show their children and see if anybody would recognise them.”
One part of the film follows non-profit group Open Arms as it conducts rescue missions at sea.
“I was really inspired by [Gianfranco Rosi’s] Fire At Sea. I had seen the way he had intertwined mundane life with what was going on around Lampedusa [in Sicily],” the director explains. She wanted audiences to reflect on “the wider crisis of immigration,” and felt that the ocean scenes would give the film an extra layer.
Until He’s Back has a running time of just under 40 minutes.
“I always set out to make a short. That’s what I wanted to do…I didn’t realise all the complications that I was going to run into Europe, the fact that it is no longer a short but more a mid-length…everybody told me nobody is going to programme a 39-minute film in a festival,” the director reflects on the complexities of the classification system for docs. “I just felt if I had gone and done a feature, it wouldn’t have been as compact and as rich for me personally.”
Nonetheless, the documentary is now in the running for Best Short Film Oscar – and has already screened successfully in around 20 festivals. The world premiere was at Big Sky in Montana in February and it has gone on to show everywhere from Doc NYC to San Francisco, Tampere and the Hamptons.
Baylon admits that it can feel strange to be feted at festivals for a film that tells such a sad story. “It’s weird when you get awards for things that are so bad. As a journalist, I am always very conflicted about awards but I do know that awards and recognition mean more people will watch it.”
She is convinced, though, that the doc is touching on very universal themes.
“The most important thing for me is for people to understand we are a time right now when the entire world is on the move. Everybody is migrating for one reason or another, whether it be climate change, looking for a better life or looking for work,” the director continues. “It’s a story that so many of us can relate to. The problem is that not all of us can afford just to pick up and go. This is what leads to having to do it in an undocumented way and [then] these horrible things happen…”
Until He’s Back was partly funded through US TV station Scripps News (where Baylon had been working as a journalist). POV came on board the project at a late stage, paying a distribution fee.
The film now is finding some influential champions, among them record producer, DJ and filmmaker Questlove who recently hosted a special screening. “We’ve known each other for 14 or 15 years. I was an intern at 30 Rock and I met him at that time. He asked me how he could support me,” the director explains the Oscar winner’s welcome involvement.
