Edmonton filmmakers Dale Bailey and Ryan Fyfe-Brown will bring their documentary Los Rios to Metro Cinema for its local premiere, following a family’s journey with the 2018 migrant caravan from Honduras toward the U.S.-Mexico border. The film tracks a mother and her three young daughters over nearly 4,500 kilometres as they seek political asylum in the United States during Donald Trump’s first midterm elections.

Thousands of people from Central America joined the caravan in 2018, leaving Honduras amid violence and poverty in search of better lives for their families. Bailey and Fyfe-Brown met the group in southern Mexico and spent two months filming, walking and hitchhiking with migrant families, and sleeping alongside them.

“It really chronicles their specific experience along this journey within this mass group of people,” Bailey said. “Being up in Canada, we just don’t really know the realities of what’s going down there.”

Bailey said he was initially unsettled by being dropped into the middle of Mexico among thousands of people seeking asylum. He worried about how people would respond to him walking among them with a camera. “At that time, I was very nervous and wondered what walking with a fancy-looking camera among these people would invite,” he recalled. “But everyone was just amazing. Not only were they really kind and open and welcoming, they realized that any cameras that were on them equaled safety.”

News outlets around the world covered the months-long caravan, with some seeking to avoid bias and others changing the story’s framing. Bailey said the film aimed to focus on the people behind the coverage. “The U.S. media does a really good job of making it not seem like there is a real person there … We wanted to attach a face to the name.”

He said the children’s resilience stood out amid the hardship. They did not fully understand the journey ahead or what awaited them in the United States, Bailey said, but continued to play when they reached parks despite being tired, sick and in pain. “To see them just being kids in the craziest setting possible was really uplifting.”

Although Los Rios centres on the 2018 caravan, Bailey hopes it will draw attention to displacement and migration happening elsewhere today. “It’s not just history. It’s so current,” he said. “There are people being displaced for so many reasons and are seeking some sort of safety and asylum ... it’s not just in our quadrant of the world. It’s everywhere.”

The documentary first screened in Toronto at the Canadian Film Festival earlier this year, where it received the jury award for Impact. Bailey said the Edmonton screening means most to him and Fyfe-Brown because people in their hometown have known the film was in progress for a long time. “(The CFF) really gave us a chance and they really helped us out … In Edmonton, I think a lot of people who know us have known that this has been in the works for a very long time. This is the big one for me, where I really feel like it’s really the celebration,” he said.

Los Rios screens at Metro Cinema at 7 p.m. Sunday. Admission is by donation, and all proceeds will go to the family featured in the film. Further screenings are planned at theatres in Calgary, Saskatoon and Vancouver, followed by a limited online release.

Based on reporting by CTV News Edmonton.