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REVIEW
It’s not the same thing to see Las Patronas—that group of women who give food to the migrants mounted on La Bestia, who pass by them at 25 miles per hour—yesterday than today. While the issue of migration has been constant throughout cinema, documentary and fiction, during the last two decades, All of Me reminds us that we must explore the question yet further. It is not the same to see Las Patronas working today, when the streets in Mexico are filled with protesters demanding that we become human once again.
The portraits that Arturo González Villaseñor creates with an almost delicate artistry, with atmospheres that seem to be handpainted, are like that: human in all their expression. Women who rise with the sun to prepare food in great pots on the fire, stirring the rice from time to time, a wooden spoon mixing beans and tortilla chips that suddenly emit smoke that leaves the screen to seduce us with the idea of being loved by someone we don’t even know. These are the women who have established the simple but overwhelming idea of tossing food to migrants whom they don’t know, in plastic bags, accompanied by bottles of water. Women, who from one generation to the next, weave their stories together alongside the social reality that the people on the train are fleeing. Women who, instead of climbing onto this imposing iron machine, have found an escape valve in a task that nobody pays them for, and few recognize.
It is important that this documentary cooked over time, in a great pot, with numerous narrative and aesthetic skills, revealing the specific kind of love that, at times, is offered to unknown people with a force that is inexplicable but immensely necessary in our days. Here are the human faces, Mexican and Central American, who after grabbing the parcels of food offered by Las Patronas, shout out a message of “Thanks” that dissolves along the tracks, through time and space.—OLIVER RENDÓN