‘The Garden We Dreamed’ Review: Powerful Mexican Migrant Drama Finds Moments of Serenity Amid Adversity
“The Garden We Dreamed” opens on a complex symphony of natural sound: layer upon layer of birdsong, insect chatter and weather-rustled foliage, all the more intensified for playing out over a virtually dark screen. It’s barely the first light of dawn in the forested wilds of central Mexico, as the camera pans across treetops just discernible from the charred sky above them, and we’re reminded that nature, even at its most tranquil, is never quiet. Still, it’s drowned out in short order by the flatter, harsher man-made noise of trucks and power tools, as trees are felled and hasty construction begins. Joaquín del Paso’s film initially promises an environmental fable of sorts, a reflection on man’s destruction of the earth beneath his feet — though we’ll soon see it’s as much about man’s destruction of man too.
The third feature by the Mexican writer-director (following 2021’s Venice-premiered “The Hole in the Fence”) is another timely entry in the rapidly expanding canon of contemporary migrant portraits, though its specific tale is an unusual one — following as it does a makeshift family of Haitian outsiders attempting to integrate with a group of Mexican logging-industry laborers, and finding themselves marginalized by a community already on the outskirts of society. But it’s a parallel strand tracing the mass southward migration of monarch butterflies, crossing paths with this human family’s long journey north, that lends del Paso’s lyrical film a distinguishing shimmer of what might be called natural magical realism — the sense of a world far larger than our immediate experience of it.
A standout in this year’s Panorama program at Berlin, “The Garden We Dreamed” is a small-scale production that nonetheless has real cinematic heft — in large part thanks to striking widescreen lensing by Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s regular DP Gökhan Tiryaki — and urgent human stakes that steadily vault this intimate, delicately sensory film into heart-in-mouth survival thriller territory. That escalation ought to turn the heads of arthouse distributors, while a long trail of further festival invitations is a given.
Esther (a superb Nehemie Bastien) and Junior (Faustin Pierre) have not been together for that long, but they’ve evidently weathered enough hardship together on their arduous trek from Haiti through North America to have bonded them into a tight, mutually dependent unit. Esther’s two young daughters, Flor (Kimaëlle Holly Preville) and Aisha (Rut Aicha Pierre Nelson), already regard Junior as a father figure, and when he takes a grueling, high-risk job with a crew of illegal loggers led by shady boss Toño (Carlos Esquivel), it’s with the responsibilities of a family breadwinner weighing down on him.
The cacophonous construction in the film opening scene is of a ramshackle company hut for Junior’s whole family to live in — nothing more than a one-room shed, it’s cramped and unequal to the coming rainy season. Esther does her best to make it a home with colorful fabrics and freshly picked wildflowers, while the girls delight in the paradisiacal playground on their doorstep: Every shade of green is present and correct in Tiryaki’s lush compositions. But hazards hover both in the turning weather, a threat in particular to Flor’s severe asthma, and in Junior’s work environment, where he’s treated with racist disregard by his co-workers, while locals incensed by the company’s violation of the forest make vengeful overtures.
There’s real, sweat-inducing tension to scenes where Esther, alone at home with her children, is encircled and menaced by mobs of men preying on the easiest of targets. But others, where relentless, shelter-soaking rain is the aggressor, are no less vivid and terrifying, amplified by the rattling, percussive intensity of extraordinary sound design by Lena Esquenazi, Valeria Mancheva and Antonio Porem. Well supported by her two marvelously unaffected onscreen children, Bastien anchors such passages with palpable physical exhaustion and staunch but visibly fraying maternal resolve: a remarkable performance that invites audiences to step outside mere sympathy into shared, visceral anxiety.
If “The Garden We Dreamed” flirts with outright horror at its most perilous points, however, it’s neither exploitative nor a punishing downer, as del Paso maintains a perspective in line with the characters’ ruggedly hopeful, die-hard persistence, and a pure, exhilarated thrill in their natural surroundings. The fiery flutter of the swarming monarchs might beautify many a frame, but their presence isn’t merely decorative, as the film ponders how multiple species move through a world increasingly hostile to them, and survive the journey — though not without occasional, peaceful pauses to take in the scenery, surveying it at once for danger and wonder.
The third feature by the Mexican writer-director (following 2021’s Venice-premiered “The Hole in the Fence”) is another timely entry in the rapidly expanding canon of contemporary migrant portraits, though its specific tale is an unusual one — following as it does a makeshift family of Haitian outsiders attempting to integrate with a group of Mexican logging-industry laborers, and finding themselves marginalized by a community already on the outskirts of society. But it’s a parallel strand tracing the mass southward migration of monarch butterflies, crossing paths with this human family’s long journey north, that lends del Paso’s lyrical film a distinguishing shimmer of what might be called natural magical realism — the sense of a world far larger than our immediate experience of it.
A standout in this year’s Panorama program at Berlin, “The Garden We Dreamed” is a small-scale production that nonetheless has real cinematic heft — in large part thanks to striking widescreen lensing by Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s regular DP Gökhan Tiryaki — and urgent human stakes that steadily vault this intimate, delicately sensory film into heart-in-mouth survival thriller territory. That escalation ought to turn the heads of arthouse distributors, while a long trail of further festival invitations is a given.
Esther (a superb Nehemie Bastien) and Junior (Faustin Pierre) have not been together for that long, but they’ve evidently weathered enough hardship together on their arduous trek from Haiti through North America to have bonded them into a tight, mutually dependent unit. Esther’s two young daughters, Flor (Kimaëlle Holly Preville) and Aisha (Rut Aicha Pierre Nelson), already regard Junior as a father figure, and when he takes a grueling, high-risk job with a crew of illegal loggers led by shady boss Toño (Carlos Esquivel), it’s with the responsibilities of a family breadwinner weighing down on him.
The cacophonous construction in the film opening scene is of a ramshackle company hut for Junior’s whole family to live in — nothing more than a one-room shed, it’s cramped and unequal to the coming rainy season. Esther does her best to make it a home with colorful fabrics and freshly picked wildflowers, while the girls delight in the paradisiacal playground on their doorstep: Every shade of green is present and correct in Tiryaki’s lush compositions. But hazards hover both in the turning weather, a threat in particular to Flor’s severe asthma, and in Junior’s work environment, where he’s treated with racist disregard by his co-workers, while locals incensed by the company’s violation of the forest make vengeful overtures.
There’s real, sweat-inducing tension to scenes where Esther, alone at home with her children, is encircled and menaced by mobs of men preying on the easiest of targets. But others, where relentless, shelter-soaking rain is the aggressor, are no less vivid and terrifying, amplified by the rattling, percussive intensity of extraordinary sound design by Lena Esquenazi, Valeria Mancheva and Antonio Porem. Well supported by her two marvelously unaffected onscreen children, Bastien anchors such passages with palpable physical exhaustion and staunch but visibly fraying maternal resolve: a remarkable performance that invites audiences to step outside mere sympathy into shared, visceral anxiety.
If “The Garden We Dreamed” flirts with outright horror at its most perilous points, however, it’s neither exploitative nor a punishing downer, as del Paso maintains a perspective in line with the characters’ ruggedly hopeful, die-hard persistence, and a pure, exhilarated thrill in their natural surroundings. The fiery flutter of the swarming monarchs might beautify many a frame, but their presence isn’t merely decorative, as the film ponders how multiple species move through a world increasingly hostile to them, and survive the journey — though not without occasional, peaceful pauses to take in the scenery, surveying it at once for danger and wonder.