Congratulations to RSEA alum J.P. Sniadecki (AM '07) on his latest film El mar la mar, shown September 17, 2017 at the Harvard Film Archive.

El mar la mar

Directed by Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki. 

US 2017, DCP, color, 94 min.
 English and Spanish with English subtitles.

Shot over several years in the Sonoran Desert near the US/Mexico border, Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki’s intensely complex and transcendent El mar la mar weaves together oral histories of desert border stories with hand-processed, grainy 16mm images of the flora, fauna and those who trespass the mysterious terrain, riddled with items its travelers have left behind. A sonically rich soundtrack adds another, sometimes eerie, dimension; the call of birds and other nocturnal noises invisibly populate the austere landscape. Over a black screen, people speak of their intense, mythic experiences in the desert: A man tells of a fifteen-foot-tall monster said to haunt the region, while a border patrolman spins a similarly bizarre tale of man versus beast. The majority of El mar la mar occurs in darkness—often with only traces of light outlining the figures moving in the night—leaving exposed the sharp edges of a fatally inscribed line. Emerging from the ethos of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, Sniadecki’s attentive documentary approach conspires supernaturally with Bonnetta’s meditations on the materiality of film. Their stunning collaboration is a mystical, folktale-like atmosphere dense with the remains of desire, memories and ghosts.

Previous work by J.P. Sniadecki includes films documenting everyday life in a rapidly changing China.

In March 2015 the Harvard Film Archive applauded Sniadecki's "remarkably diverse but consistently fascinating" work at a featured Film Series titled Ghost Towns and Steel Rails: J.P. Sniadecki in China: The Iron Ministry (2013) and Yumen (2012).