Director Zachary Cotler adds, “The Wall of Mexico is an allegory. Perhaps all works of art are allegorical, some more deliberately than others. When a situation is too complex to be satisfactorily analyzed via standard methods (political science, cultural criticism, psychology), the social utility of art is at its highest. One can, lacking anything more precise, create an allegory as a sort of loose net to throw over the situation.
What situation? The one we know as well as anything but have no name for — that situation made of money, class, differing melanin levels in skin, global warming, refugees and walls, the overwhelming of the human by machines — the situation that is coming to a boil; and who can say whether the consequences will turn out to be a sudden World War, or a slow decline and fall, and/or a Singularity, techno-utopian or terrible. The data overwhelm.
And so, instead of trying to solve the insoluble, one crafts an allegory, which gives, at least, a sense of having processed something, and which, I hope, can metaphorically take in not just the US-Mexico border debacle, but also the Israel-Palestine wall, the refugee crisis in Europe, the India-Bangladesh wall, and the many invisible walls between cultures and classes.”
Dark Star Pictures released The Wall of Mexico in virtual theaters on September 18 and VOD on October 13.