The first thing that pops out about director Marc Silver is his gentle, mousy presence, a complete contradiction to the raw and gritty nature of his documentary Who is Dayani Cristal?
The idea for the documentary came about when Silver and his actor-activist friend, Gael Garcia Bernal, started an online call-out for stories of resistance against the division of social classes. One grim story grabbed their attention: the discovery of skeletons and dead bodies of migrants in the desert of Arizona.
London’s Silver and Mexico’s Bernal, who have worked together on human rights projects in the past, took the story and ran with it, centring it around one dead migrant with “Dayani Cristal” tattooed on his stomach.
Despite the emotionally-tasking nature of the film, Silver told tabloid! that, unlike the migrants whose painful experiences were being shown, he felt safe as he could hide behind the camera.
“This isn’t your life. Within a couple of weeks of wherever you are around the world, you can be back home ‘safe and sound’ so to speak,” he said.
“I spent about four or five weeks on and off in the morgue in Arizona and on a daily basis they receive horrific human remains — skeletal remains — and what, in a crude way, is called ‘fresh’ dead bodies. That certainly, on a personal level, makes you reconsider who you are as a human — that we’re all the same beneath the skin because we’re essentially all skeletal. It makes you question how the construct of race and class mean that some people [have to] die in this way, and some people don’t. In that way, it was extremely powerful.”
Who is Dayani Cristal? will be screened at Marina Mall Vox 3 at 3.45pm. For ticket details, go to adff.ae.
