Cartel Land Full Documentary

[Suk Harian]

CartelLand is a 2015 American documentary film directed by Matthew Heineman about the Mexican Drug War, especially vigilante groups fighting Mexican drug cartels. The film focuses on Tim "Nailer" Foley, the leader of Arizona Border Recon, and Dr. Jos Mireles, a Michoacn-based physician who leads the Autodefensas. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2016.[3]

In Mexico, the film focuses on Jos Manuel Mireles Valverde, known locally as "El Doctor". Mireles becomes fed up with the local Knights Templar Cartel. He gathers a group of citizens from the state of Michoacn and leads an uprising, driving the cartel out of the region.

In the US, the film follows an American veteran named Tim "Nailer" Foley, who is forming a small paramilitary group called the Arizona Border Recon. His goal is to stop the same Mexican cartel from conducting business in the US.

Heineman got the idea for the film after reading about Arizona Border Recon in an article in Rolling Stone magazine, and then his father sent him a Wall Street Journal article about Jos Manuel Mireles and the Autodefensas.[4][5] "The minute I read that article, I knew I wanted to create a parallel story of vigilantes on both sides of the border. I wanted to know what happens when government institutions fail and citizens feel like they have to take the law into their own hands."[5]

Heineman won the Best Director Award and Special Jury Award for Cinematography for the film in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where the documentary premiered.[14] He was presented the award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary by the Directors Guild of America,[15] as well as the 2015 Courage Under Fire Award for the film by the International Documentary Association.[16] The film was also nominated for Best Documentary at the 69th British Academy Film Awards[17] and for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 88th Academy Awards.[3] The film received the 2015 Documentary Film Award from the George Polk Awards in Journalism.[18]

It took many months to gain their trust and the access I needed to tell their stories from an intimate, yet action-driven, verit perspective. Gaining this access and dealing with the risky situations the access put me in were by far my biggest challenges.

Knowing the danger stakes were much higher in Michoacn and that I was not fluent in Spanish, I reached out to a few journalists in NYC and was connected to Myles Estey, a Mexico City-based journalist who ended up becoming a co-producer on the film. Myles then connected me with Daniel Fernandez, a journalist and local fixer in Michoacn. He knew the terrain, people and politics there. With this amazing local team, I quickly evaluated the risks of shooting down there, and we prepared for our first shoot. Less then two weeks later, I was in Mexico filming.

Myles and, especially Daniel, were key in helping connect me to El Doctor and the rest of the Autodefensas. They knew the land, they knew what roads were safe to drive on, what places were safe to stay at. And Daniel already had strong connections with El Doctor and some of the other Autodefensas. Together, over the next nine months, they help me develop an intimate relationship with our subjects. They were indispensible in helping me get access to a story that otherwise would have been hard to tap into.

So much of the access that I was able to gain with the Autodefensas was over months, not days. With newspapers cutting foreign bureaus and budgets shrinking for long-form, investigative journalism, documentary filmmakers are often filling a void nowadays in the media landscape with their ability to spend time with their stories and subjects. There is absolutely no way I could have told this complex story in a few days or even a few weeks. I was fortunate to be able to spend almost nine months (one to two weeks of every month) in Michoacn. During that time, I was able to create a deep rapport with my subjects, developing storylines and character arcs. And, most importantly, I was able to develop trust.

From the moment I stepped foot in Mexico, my goal was to shoot in a meth lab, and I knew I wanted to begin the film there. We tried for months to get into a lab. Every shoot I would try to find somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who cooked. Amongst our vast network of people down there, we thought we had a guy who could hook it up, and he kept telling us to be patient and promised to make it happen.

Just before midnight, my fixer told me that it was time to leave. We were escorted out of the forest into the fields, past the villages and towns, and onto the highway. I was disappointed because I wanted to get more footage, more visuals to illustrate the process of meth cooking. So, before we left, we made a date with the chefs to come back the following night.

We were given instructions to be in a certain village at a certain time the next night. We went and we waited. And we continued to wait, but they never showed up. Through a series of cryptic text messages, we arranged to meet the next night, and again they blew us off. And the same thing happened a third night.

It was a good lesson too, because it ultimately allowed me to get an important perspective that I needed to better understand the story I was telling. And several weeks later, on our final shoot, I randomly ran into the man from the pool hall, who had all of the juice about what was really happening, and he agreed to be filmed. This interview ended up being very integral to the final act of the film.

Editor's note: Over the next few weeks, we at IDA will be introducing our community to the films that have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an Oscar nomination in the documentary category. You can see Cartel Land on Saturday, February 27 at DocuDay, the IDA's daylong celebration with back-to-back screenings of the nominees at the Writers Guild of America Theater. This article was first published in July, 2015.

The drug wars among the handful of cartels in Mexico over the past decade have cost tens of thousands of lives, as the nation south of the border struggles to imagine a world beyond the extraordinary level of violence and brutality that has dominated the landscape. North of the border, Americans have helped fuel the narcotics industry with an ongoing demand and an increasingly sophisticated trafficking network that spans all 50 states.

Into this seemingly endless fray stepped filmmaker Matthew Heineman, whose previous film Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, which he directed with Susan Froemke, covered decidedly less treacherous territory. For Cartel Land, Heineman eschewed the pundits and policy makers, taking a tenacious, ground-level route to gain entry into paramilitary groups on both sides of the border: Autodefensas, a vigilante force combatting the notorious Knights Templar cartel in Michoacn; and the Arizona Border Recon, a faction whose aim is to thwart cartel violence from spilling into the US.

Cartel Land opens with a nighttime scene of a mobile meth lab in the jungles of Michoacn, where heavily armed men cook the product driving the drug trade and spurring the chaos at the US/Mexican border. This stunning footage foreshadows the cinematic adventure that Heineman brings to the screen in his borderland journey. Along the way, he dodges bullets in a hair-raising shootout and even lingers outside a torture chamber.

Having never filmed in dangerous situations before, we talked to journalists and filmmakers before heading to Mexico, had an amazing local crew with intimate knowledge of the area, wore bullet-proof vests, and took what security precautions we could. But at the end of the day, you can only plan for so much, and most situations were on-the-ground judgment calls.

Cartel Land pushed me into some pretty precarious places. I was in shootouts on the streets of Michoacn and in Breaking Bad-like meth labs in the middle of the dark, desert night. Utilizing small crews or shooting by myself, my goal was to be there to capture in real time each chapter of the ever-evolving and arcing stories, with the camera in the action, not observing it from the outside. It was a wild adventure and a grueling film to make. I ended up with a story I could have never imagined.

The more time I spent down there, the more complex the story became. It was partly an ascent of people seeking to fight evil and partly a descent into hell as they took the law into their own hands, with many twists and turns in between. It is about elemental issues of order and chaos, of the desire for law but also of terrifying brutality and lawlessness.

I became even more motivated, almost obsessed, as the lines between good and evil became ever more blurred. The film doesn't offer simple answers and, instead, presents a story that I believe will be interpreted and understood in many different ways.

It is this moral ambiguity that intrigues me, and it emerges naturally in the story and in our characters. For me, it became a timeless story of the conflict between idealism and violence, which has eerie echoes throughout history and across the world today.

We as Americans have become obsessed by ISIS and frightened by ISIS. But there is a war that is happening in the country to the south of us. Roughly 80,000 people have been killed since 2007. Some 20,000 people have disappeared. And this is a war that we are connecting to. We are feeding it.

Cartel Land recently topped the ITunes documentary charts in Latin America, which means lots of people are watching the film at home on computer screens. Is it important for your work to be seen in theaters?

We fought really hard to get the film shown in theaters in Mexico at the same time it was released in the States. Soon after that, the film was heavily pirated. Every bodega in Mexico had a bootleg copy of Cartel Land that was playing on the screen inside the bodega. In an ironic twist, the cartels are the ones that control the black market DVD market. So, the cartels were profiting from a movie about themselves.

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