The River and the Wall, a 2019 documentary by Fin and Fur Films, is a love letter to the fourth-longest river in the United States: the Rio Grande. Forming the border between Texas and Mexico, the river originates in Colorado then shrinks from the demands of dams, agriculture, and urban drinking water. By the time it reaches Texas, it’s little more than a trickle. Once regarded as the most endangered river in the US, the Rio is now facing a new challenge: a monstrous wall of steel and concrete proposed by President Donald Trump as a solution to illegal immigration at the southern border.  

The film’s ringleader and director, Ben Masters, a wildlife filmmaker out of Texas, corrals four of his friends—a biologist, a conservationist, a fellow filmmaker, and a river guide—to navigate 1,200 miles of the Rio Grande. When they begin their journey, in December 2017, their mission is straightforward: They want to understand where a US-Mexico border wall would go and what effects it would have on both human and wildlife migrants. The journey was prescient. Almost two years later, in early September, the Trump administration diverted $3.6 million from military construction projects to fund the wall.  

The crew plans a trip from El Paso, Texas, to where the Rio pours into the Gulf of Mexico. To navigate the shoreline, the explorers start by bike, transfer to horseback at Big Bend National Park, and move to canoes once the river widens. They take off from an El Paso parking lot in a celebratory rush of windbreakers and spandex.

Alongside the five friends, the film’s antagonist—the wall itself—stutters down the border like a mouthful of rotten teeth. Early on, mounted on bikes, the group waits at the copper gate of a 25-foot section of border blocking them from the Rio. Between the wall and the river is a dozen feet of road sacrificed to security; according to an off-camera Border Patrol agent, access points to the river require agents to open the gates. An estimated 1 million acres of Texas could become no-man’s-land, stranded between the river and the wall. The film estimates that the federal government could use eminent domain to seize land from 2,000 US landowners, and a contiguous wall would cede much of this land (back) to Mexico. 

The origin of the movie, and Masters’s first love, is clearly wildlife. His affection for his horses —once free-roaming mustangs—is endearing, and the film’s wildlife shots are both frequent and moving. They tell the story of a much-disputed region with reverence instead of fear. 

The group meets with Texas legislators along the border to gain a local perspective. Republican Will Hurd, decked out in black cycling shorts, rides along with the crew, carrying his bike overhead as they cross a sputtering ditch of the Rio. “We’re at net-zero immigration from Mexico,” says Hurd. According to the film, since 2007 the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US has grown not from illegal border crossings, but from overstayed visas. While it makes sense to have a fence line in some areas of urban-to-urban contact, continues Hurd, “building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security.”  

It’s also a maelstrom. The film transitions from biking along the border to riding through Big Bend National Park on Masters’s beloved mustangs, shifting focus from human to wildlife crossings. Aerial footage shows the river punching through over 250 miles of canyons in the park, demonstrating the impossibility of building a wall that traces the river’s border. Instead, the wall would have to be built inland, disenfranchising the last public lands in Texas, and again, blocking US citizens from the river as a site of recreation. It would also cut off the main source of water for large mammals who need to move freely in order to survive.

The group dips into Boquillas, on the Mexican side of the border, to talk to community members who would see similar impacts to their wild places. Instead of building a wall, the film asks, why not turn the millions of acres held in trust by both countries into a binational park? How could existing resources build connections instead of splintering the region?  

In an interview with Sierra, Masters reflected on the difficulty of sharing wonderful and underrepresented voices, and the extremely complex grab bag of issues, from the border in the brief span of a two-hour film. Instead of solutions, Masters and Austin Alvarado, the group’s river guide, agree that the movie tried to convey the myriad of issues and opinions on the border. “Not wanting a wall isn’t enough,” says Alvarado. “You have to understand why it doesn’t work.  You have to understand what it’s even intended for.”  

The film’s moment of peak tension occurs when, separated at night in their canoes on a stretch of the Rio Grande, the paddlers hear a group of people—whom they speculate must be migrants or members of a drug cartel—on the shore. Fearful, they decide to call the Border Patrol agent featured earlier in the film. For Alvarado, it became a moment of reflection. The alarm, fear, and uncertainty he felt was a mere instant compared to what migrants face for years after they cross, and then live under the radar, in the US. 

Alvarado, the son of Guatemalan immigrants, called his parents after the run-in. While they understood the group’s choice to inform the Border Patrol, they told their son that could’ve been his family 30 years ago. Alvarado’s family entered the US on their fourth attempt—his mother and elder brother were jailed in Mexico during a previous attempt—and were one of very few families approved for asylum in 1997.  

“You think if someone’s desperate enough to go from Guatemala to Austin, they’re going to turn around just because they see a wall in front of them? That’s absurd,” Alvarado said. “Wanting a better life—that’s the issue that needs to be approached.” 

In Luis Alberto Urrea’s 2004 book, The Devil’s Highway, which captures the plight of migrants in an account of US border policy still absurdist almost two decades before the current crisis, Urrea describes the plight of five men west of the Rio Grande so near death in their drought-ridden crossing, they have forgotten much of who they are and where they come from.

“They were beyond rational thought. Visions of home fluttered through their minds. Soft green bushes, waterfalls, children, music. Butterflies the size of your hand. Leaves and beans of coffee plants burning through the morning mist as if lit from within. Rivers. Not like this place where they’d gotten lost,” Urrea writes. “Nothing soft here.”  

The biggest draw of the movie? It seeks to recapture some of this softness. The film is a gesture toward the border’s untapped potential: to become a site of unification instead of separation. The border crisis is ugly. What left is beautiful? Here, along the river, a flock of birds. A pair of men raising their day’s work—catfish as long as their wingspan—with unabashed pride. When Alvarado asks the fishermen, in Spanish, what they think of the wall, they laugh and tell the paddlers, “they’ll just fly over it like Superman.”