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Border control in the United States has been a topic that often triggers heated discussions in recent years. Fuelled by a (former) president who constantly incited hateful ideologies in his public remarks, any discourse on the subject often feels highly politicized. In
Maisie Crow‘s
At the Ready, political messaging takes a backseat to the much more personal stories of high school students living in Texas. These students live close to the border, actively participate in an extracurricular law enforcement club, and have a worldview that is shaped by an environment in which most adults only dare to view from afar.
The 15 Best Films We Saw at Sundance
Eliott Grover, provided by
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The 2020 Sundance Film Festival was one of the last major events of its kind –– or any kind –– to take place before the world changed forever. With little time to prepare a viable pivot, other festivals like SXSW and Cannes were forced to cancel. As the pandemic raged through the summer and into the fall, Sundance organizers understood that they would have to radically reimagine their event in order to save it.
The 2021 festival, which concluded yesterday, was entirely virtual. Some other festivals, fearful that sponsors and distributors could shy away from truncated or remote programs, are reluctant to abandon in-person expositions. Sundance, however, leaned in. Under the leadership of first-year director Tabitha Jackson, the programming team spent months designing a proprietary streaming platform and building a digital world to preserve the energy of a festival environment.
Kathy Huang/Sundance Institute
What’s it like to be a teenager in 2021?
Teens have always been great movie subjects, perhaps especially for documentaries. Watching a nonfiction movie set in a high school, adults can sigh with both nostalgia and relief. High schools are microcosms of society as well as a peek into the future, and the arc of a school year makes for a natural story progression.
For decades, documentarians have often trained their cameras on teenagers. But being a teenager in 2021 is not like being a teenager in 1981, or, for that matter, 2011. Teenagers now write, direct, distribute, and star in their own mini-documentaries virtually every day, thanks to smartphones and social media. And making a nonfiction film in which your subjects are used to not just being on camera, but directing and editing and constructing their own image for it, is a special challenge.
A documentary about students at an El Paso High School who are interested in pursuing careers in law enforcement.
Director Maisie Crow says 900 schools in Texas have “some sort of criminal justice class or program.” As a Marfa resident herself, who covers the complexities of life along the U.S.-Mexico border through her work as editor-in-chief of the Big Bend Sentinel and Presidio Internacional newspapers, Crow told Texas Standard she was especially interested in exploring the role of law enforcement in Far West Texas.
“One of the things I love most about El Paso is its relationship to Juarez,” Crow said. “It really is one city divided by a border, and these kids really do live a cross-border life. I mean, they have community both in Juarez and in El Paso, and that was very important to me to make that clear in the film.”
Dir. Maisie Crow â 4 Stars
A still from At The Ready (2021), directed by Maisie Crow.
In Texas, there are over 900 high schools with law enforcement education and recruitment programs. One of those schools, Horizon High School, is 10 miles from the Mexico-United States border border in El Paso, Texas â the largest city on the border and the city with the highest immigration rates in the country. At the school, which is the setting of Maisie Crowâs latest documentary, students have the ability to pursue law enforcement in both a class and a school-sanctioned club. The class focuses on policing, handcuffs, use of force, and âparamilitary training,â while the club takes students to compete against other schools in realistic reenactments of drug raids, active shooter situations, and hostage recovery.