User Reviews

A great documentary should document, not persuade or conceptually explain the world to me. It should show me a piece of life I might otherwise not have access to. If it's effective, the vicarious experience will feel real. Ultimately, I, the viewer, will feel more connected to life as a whole.

By this guideline, "El Field" is a surprising, refreshing view of the lives of Mexican migrant workers that allows the viewer to step into their world, to join them on the bus ride from Mexicali to the industrial farm in California where they work, performing their normal, day to day activities, and taking a tour, beholding all the beauty that lies therein, the beauty of the prosaic, the beauty of the bucolic, the beauty that is life.

When I stood up to leave the theater at the end of the film, I felt as though I had spent the day with a friend who had taken me along with them to work. In my heart, I felt the beauty underlying their daily work routine.

Highly recommended!

i was very disappointed in this film. visually it was beautiful but i believe that it was extremely uninformative about the situation of the farmworkers who come from Mexico on a daily basis to work in the imperial valley in California.

daniel rosas, the director, appeared at the screening which i saw. he was asked whether he had trouble getting permission to do this film. he said initially there had been some resistance because of the growers' secretaries misunderstanding their authority. once he spoke to the growers' themselves, he was given permission. this is not surprising as rosas's film does not touch on anything vaguely controversial.

the film is virtually a silent film with only the sound of the machines, a few brief exchanges of conversation between the workers and a bit of music. there is no commentary and no information about the area (the lady sitting next to me thought they were in Texas), the demographics of the labor pool, the nature of the agriculture (non-organic i was told in answer to my question), the method by which workers are granted work visas or the conditions under which the farmworkers toil. when asked whether he'd edited out complaints about working conditions, rosas said he'd heard none as the $95/day the workers receive is considered a great deal of money in Mexico. he also reassured us that they had access to medical treatment.

in my view, this impressionist film should not be categorized as a documentary.