The North-South divide widens, comfortable haves are fearful of despairing have-nots, and the spectacle of To the Other Side/Al otro lado becomes old hat ho-hum to the documentary- and news-jaded. The Third World enters without knocking or registering, and the U.S., E.U., Singapore, Canada and Thailand shore up physical and legal barriers even while taking silent advantage of illegals fleeing poverty, war, genocide, drought, famine, disease, repression, you name it.

Gregory Navas’ cowriten script for his shattering El Norte made that 1983 PBS fiction piece a benchmark of honest realism that not many films of any type have equaled. In contrast, Mexican-born and partly U.S.-raised Natalia Almada’s feature début takes as its point of departure a different, potentially interesting aspect of the situation but fails to make a go of it. Showing at the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth annual Documentary Fortnight Expanded series and scheduled for March release (when it will be joined by the short Birdkillers/Matapájaros), the film is earnest in consideration of a worthy cause but suffers from the lack of innovation and imagination plaguing today’s deluge of non-fiction films.

Straddling the Tropic of Cancer and famous for Pacific Coast resort Mazatlán, Sinaloa is tourist-billed as one of few places where the pre-Columbian ballgame bulama is still played by indigenes. More widely known but not officially plugged is the fact that, its fishing industry and fleet moribund, the state has become a drug-smuggling haven.

Abject poverty “that runs in my blood” and hopelessness leave few options for the young. There is trafficking, which mostly means starting out as a courier transporting the merchandise across the land border or by boat as lobo marino, “sea wolf” though subtitled as “sea lion.” The alternative is paying a “coyote” to get one through the dangerous desert alive and into the glittery northern neighbor with its allure of illegal work.

Around this macho world of risk-taking has grown a subdivision of the centuries-old corrido, Latin America’s folk-ballad “archives of a man’s life,” the kind of newsletter for the unschooled that troubadours circulated throughout medieval Europe. The film’s ostensible subject, with which it begins and ends but to which it returns with too little frequency, is the career of Magdiel Rubio Burgos, at twenty-three the oldest of his siblings, hope of his family, and a self-taught aspiring singer-songwriter.

Along with so many informal interviews that it’s hard to remember who’s who, the film embraces too much for its sixty-six minutes. Family members, neighbors, farmers and fishermen, smugglers and singers appear south of the border, but focus soon shifts to the barrios of Los Angeles, the streets, fans, studios and successful clubs like El Farallón, solo and ensemble performers female as well as male, the whole lucrative Latin music sector. Even a corrido-rap connection is drawn but not developed. Lurking in the background but hardly hidden is a male code of fatalism, honor, danger and death, and, the pleasant unthreatening Magdiel in effect left adrift, the central thread gathers about Chalino Sánchez. Killed in 1992 when he returned home to avenge a sister’s dishonor, Chalino followed a not-uncommon path of being paid to sing the Robin-Hood praises of narcotraffickers, was a star who became a legend in death, and inspired imitators of his stage mannerisms and a whole style of dress.

Further diluting any concerted impact is a late volte-face to the wretches attempting to sneak into this promised land and the naïve patrols, official and volunteer, who mouth platitudes so self-righteously inane as to make The Border’s Jack Nicholson sound profound.

Magdiel’s mother packs his bag as if her son were leaving for a freshman dorm, the placid despairing are hunted down and sent back, square cement John Doe blocks mark the six feet of Holtville, Arizona, soil that awaited many, and there is a closing joke about Coca-Cola that smells of drugs. By then it’s too much, too dissipated, and this maybe first day of the rest of a life, goes unnoticed. 

(Released by Cinema Tropical; not rated by MPAA.)