Editor’s Note: This is part of our coverage of South by South West (SXSW) 2023.
By definition, the Texas borderlands are where one artificial nation bleeds—too often literally—into another. It’s a region where metaphorical walls between languages and cultures crumble while physical walls are breached and scaled, a space where a fictitious line is as real as family or hunger. In the world of Deadland, a new feature film that premiered in Austin at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, it’s also a place where even more primordial veils are pierced: those between past and present, life and death.
Deadland, the directorial debut of University of Texas at Austin-educated Lance Larson, opens with a pair of Border Patrol agents scanning through binoculars for human activity in the West Texas desert. An Anglo agent, portrayed with smoldering intensity by actor McCaul Lombardi, is griping that migrants rescued by the Border Patrol are insufficiently “grateful.” Ángel Waters (Roberto Urbina), a Latino agent and the film’s protagonist, is responding coolly when a van hauling drugs appears in the distance. The pair gives chase, ultimately confiscating the narcotic cargo but letting the teenage driver go free. The driver, the Anglo agent notes, does not say “thank you.”
