Hot Docs 2025: Unwelcomed

Unwelcomed is a haunting portrait of migration—haunting in both senses of the word. On the one hand, it’s hauntingly beautiful, with remarkable drone cinematography showcasing the mountains, deserts, and coastlines of remote northern Chile. On the other hand, it’s hauntingly disturbing in its depiction of the lives of Venezuelan migrants passing into Chile across the country’s northern border. Modern politics are dominated by migration policy. Unwelcomed offers an illuminating primer on what migration actually looks like beyond the abstract, presenting both macro and micro views of the phenomenon through the lens of Chile in the 2020s.

In the 2010s, then Chilean president Sebastián Piñera invited Venezuelans to pass through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru to settle for a new life in Chile. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took him up on the offer and made the arduous trek south, mostly on foot. The north of Chile is a cold, desert landscape rimmed by the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Andes to the east. It’s a harsh climate, especially for Venezuelans who are used to living in the tropics. But they pass through it on foot in hopes of finding work and a normal life further south in Chile.

Directors Amilcar Infante and Sebastian Gonzalez Mendez trace the movement of migrants from the northern border with Peru near Chacalluta south to Iquique. In the macro lens, they use drones to depict the beautiful, otherworldly landscape of northern Chile, where long stretches of land are home to nothing but barren peaks and bubbling sulfur pools. The slow, creeping drone shots are reminiscent of the work of Edward Burtynsky and his films such as Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, while the ambient droning on the soundtrack recalls the filmmaking of Denis Villeneuve in Sicario (another work about borders) and Blade Runner 2049. This approach helps us to understand the environment and puts the migration in context of the terrain.

In the micro lens, Infante and Gonzalez Mendez interview various migrants and Chilean locals to get their perspective on the migration south. They chat with families taking their two and three-year olds on the road and with others celebrating holidays in UN migrant camps. They also interview angry Chileans and display archival footage of violent protests in these northern towns, where locals drove the migrants out, burning their encampments and destroying their meagre belongings.

The stories of many of the migrants are harrowing. They plead for understanding and speak in unadorned desperation about their circumstances. Many were driven out of Venezuela due to political persecution, leaving behind sons and husbands who were promptly imprisoned or killed by the Maduro regime. Others are day labourers who knew that it was a risk to make the journey but did it anyway. One woman’s story is particularly heartbreaking, as she speaks of losing a baby to stillbirth due to the seemingly-deliberate inaction of Chilean hospital attendants.

Unwelcomed contains enormous grief, but it’s not misery porn as the film doesn’t wallow in these stories nor does it use the emotions stirred by the scenes of misery to polemically argue about political solutions. Rather, it simply gives a voice to the poor, alongside its vision of the terrain. It also cunningly shows that the tension between migrants and Chilean locals is a matter of poor versus poor; the lives of the Chilean locals are unmoored by the arrivals of migrants. In some towns, the migrants outnumber the Chileans. While the government based in Santiago invited the migrants, it did nothing to equip the northern border towns with resources to adequately receive them. Thus, the locals are left dealing with the mess. Tensions inevitably flare in such a scenario.

Unwelcomed also provides a useful corrective to typical portraits of migration in the western media, as it shows Latino migrants rejected by Latino locals. A purely racial reading of migratory tensions breaks down in the face of such a situation. Thus, Unwelcomed shows the complexities of migration in the 21st century: the harsh landscapes migrants must pass through; the messy political situations that drive them out and greet them when they arrive; the hope that fuels their movement; the profound frustration that awaits them. It’s never reductive, but rather illuminating and provocative, a local portrait of a global issue.

8 out of 10

Unwelcomed (2025, Chile)

Directed by Amilcar Infante and Sebastian Gonzalez Mendez.

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