http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/reporting-from-mexico/15822/Among new work showing here for the first time, one film sure to create a stir on both sides of the border is director Kieran Fitzgerald’s disquieting The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández, which recounts in chilling, unsentimental detail the 1997 shooting death of the eponymous Mexican-American high school student by a four-man U.S. Marine border patrol in Redford, Texas. Narrated by Tommy Lee Jones, whose The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada proffered a fictionalized version of the Hernández case, Fitzgerald’s film (which was awarded the top prize of the festival’s human rights jury) is no mere DVD supplement. Rather, with its harrowing on-camera testimonials from Hernández’s family and friends, as well as three of the four implicated Marines, it offers an urgent contribution to the raging debate over the physical and psychological divides separating the U.S. from its neighbor to the south.
