HOT SPRINGS DOCUMENTARY FF INTERVIEW: Lisa Molomot and Jeff Bemiss (along with Kate Spradley) talk about their film, MISSING IN BROOKS COUNTY

Lisa Molomot and Jeff Bemiss’ MISSING IN BROOKS COUNTY, which won the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival’s Best Southern Feature Award, explores an aspect of the immigration issue that seldom, if ever, gets discussed or debated, or even considered. That slice of this ever-controversial pie is the effort to identify the people who didn’t make it, those who died trying to cross the border or just after they had successfully made it into the states. Brooks County, Texas – not a border town, but close enough to be a midpoint once immigrants have squeezed past checkpoints and rough terrain, but not quite to civilization, is infamous for the many that have died there – anonymously.

Whether it be via the families desperately trying to locate their lost loved ones or at least get the closure of knowing what happened to them, or being the fly on the wall as the forensics people sift through what would essentially be a mountain of bones to find their DNA needle in a haystack, Molomot and Bemiss show us people trying to remind us that those bones and those corpses were also people. It’s a heartbreaking reminder and one that is easy to lose sight of, but it is something that the people that appear in the film refuse to let go of.

In the interview, I talk to Molomot and Bemiss about their real on-the-ground approach to filmmaking as a tandem, the challenge of finding this film’s “story,” the beauty of having an editor who has “distance” from the director(s) to add an objective eye, and Kate Spradley, one of the film’s subjects, also weighs in on what it was like to have their cameras focused on her as she tried to solve these mysteries. All of them talk about the cameras catching “human moments” and what leads to accomplishing that.