I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry
2023 · 13m · USA
Directed by Luis Fernando Puente
Genres: drama
Tones: melancholic, tender, tense
Maria Luisa and her husband Jorge arrive for a green card interview that appears straightforward until minor bureaucratic inconsistencies begin to accumulate, threatening the entire application.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Puente constructs his film's argument through formal means — the square frame, the bureaucratic enclosure — which is the difference between a film that describes injustice and one that enacts what injustice feels like to inhabit.
Green card interview with a square frame as instrument of constraint — that's actual formal thinking. Capernaum and A Separation are real comparators; this premise earns them.
Oscar Ignacio Jiménez's tight square frame physically enclosing the couple inside the bureaucratic space — aspect ratio as constraint argument. Thirteen minutes of immigration interview tension where the camera does political work.
Reviews
Cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jimenez employs a tight square frame to put the couple in a bind — the form doing the argument's work as quietly as the film's title does loudly.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2023
- Dallas International Film Festival 2023, Best Short Film
- Nevada City Film Festival 2023, Best Film
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2023
- Cine Las Americas 2023, Best Hecho en Tejas