The word 'mojados,' translated from Spanish, means 'wetback.' This, of course, is slang for illegal immigrants who ford the Rio Grande river to cross over from Mexico to the United States. The sociopolitical implications of immigration are widespread, controversial and unavoidable; the issue great enough that, although it is never even mentioned specifically in the documentary Mojados: Through The Night, it serves as the film's backdrop all the same. Because this context is inescapable, the film wisely takes on a completely apolitical tone. It is, strictly, a humanist film - and a brilliant one, because it engages its issue by becoming the issue itself.

Specifically, the film is about four men who make a 160 mile trek through the Texas desert. This same journey is made by thousands of immigrants each year, and, we learn, many of them die from exposure en route. Of those that do survive, many are so weakened by the journey that they are unable to escape the Border Patrol agents that scout the highways and surrounding deserts. These conditions are understood, and accepted, and of the four men the film focuses on, two have made the journey before, and more than once. All but one are in their twenties, and all have families they want to support. They are referred to only by their nicknames: Guapo, Oso, Tigre, Viejo - or Handsome, Bear, Tiger and Old Man. This generalization is more than just colloquial congeniality; it effectively turns these four men into representations of immigrant culture.

I say the film is about the flight of four men, when, in truth, they number five. The film's director, Tommy Davis, befriended the four men in their hometown of Michoacan and convinced them to let him accompany - and videotape - them as they made their crossing. This involved making the journey with them, enduring the same hardships with them, and indeed, facing the distinct possibility of death with them. And while he never once appears in the documentary (although he does provide the after-the-fact narration), his presence is palpable; he's not a fly-on-the-wall, but a participant in the story. El Gringo Mojado, Davis' companions call him, although there is one caveat in his favor, likewise never mentioned but always understood: his US citizenship.

To put it bluntly: this film took guts to make, just as the journey across the desert takes guts for the immigrants that made it and make it still. These two separate risks are intertwined and indistinguishable, and it is because of this that the film is so exceptional. Were a more traditional approach made - an objective examination of the issue, or a retrospective or intermittent attempt at the same narrative - it may well have been good, but not as good. That this film and films like it can be made at all is a result first and foremost of the tenacity of the filmmakers, but is also one of the wonderful benefits of the digital video revolution. Mojados simply would not have been possible were it shot on film.

As I was watching the movie, it struck me how similar it was in tone and structure to Michael Winterbottom's docudrama In This World, which was about a boy from Afghanistan smuggling himself across borders and into Europe. That film, while based on a screenplay, featured real immigrant characters playing versions of themselves, bribing real guards, illegally crossing real borders. The filmmakers were right along with them, with their tiny digital camera, and the film, like this one, brought an eye opening subjectivity to an epidemic we tend to depersonalize when we think about it.

The journey depicted in Mojados was originally supposed to last four days; instead, it takes ten, and it does not end well. The final note is one of some sort of hopelessness; specifically, because of the fate of the four men, but also more generally, because of the implicit understanding that their fate will be shared by millions of men, women and children over the coming years. I think the film is very much about hope, and the transience of hope; and how a daydream of a better life simply becomes a prayer for survival. Davis is the audience's vicarious window to their experience, and over the course of the film, any thoughts of legality or politics vanish. Their hope becomes our hope. This is an interesting paradox: technically, we already are their hope.