Who Is Dayani Cristal?

Immigration is now on everyone’s mind, from the halls of Congress to the deserts of Texas and Arizona. Director Marc Silver and producer Gael Garcia Bernal have devised a startling hybrid documentary that looks at the issue from the most basic human vantage point. Silver follows a team of forensic anthropologists from the Arizona Medical Examiner’s office as they analyze the remains of a migrant found in the desert. The only identification mark is a tattoo that reads “Dayani Cristal.” Silver cuts between the anthropologists as they slowly and painstakingly piece together the man’s identity; and Bernal as a migrant on the arduous journey by train and on foot through Latin America and all the way to the southern US border and the possibility of a new life. Measured, meditative and scrupulously constructed, alternately sobering and enlightening, Who Is Dayani Cristal? describes a possible, terrible fate experienced by scores of people every year.