45th Parallel (2022) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Focusing on the Haskell Free Library and Opera House – a unique municipal site that straddles the jurisdictions of Canada and the United States – the work continually recasts the border as at once powerful yet facile, absurd yet lethal.

Originally built in 1904, the Haskell building was designed as a symbol of unity between Canada and the US and is one of the only cross-border theatres in the world. Anyone can enter unchecked and, though a thick black line runs through the entire building, once inside the border all but disappears.

Filmed on location to activate the legal and symbolic potential of the site, 45th Parallel unfolds as a monologue in five acts, performed by acclaimed filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel and scored by the late great Susan Alcorn Lobato. The story centres on Hernández vs. Mesa, a judicial case covering the fatal shooting in 2010 of an unarmed fifteen-year-old Mexican national by a US Border Patrol agent. At the supreme court Mesa’s bullet, which crossed the US/Mexico border, began to implicate missiles fired in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Libya. If this murder could be tried in the US, so too could 91,340 drone strikes.

Each act of the monologue is demarcated by a scenographic change in the hand-painted backdrop on the Opera House stage. Starting with the original backdrop of a picturesque Venice canal, two newly commissioned scenes. One references a 1920 painting by Richard Carline of an aerial view of Damascus and its surrounding landscape, and the other the concrete culvert of the 2010 El Paso-Juárez cross-border shooting. The changing backdrops draw attention to the ways in which borders are not just lines but, rather, richly layered spaces.

The film renders the Haskell Free Library and Opera House as a political and geographical grey zone, reminding us how free movement, free knowledge and free space are under threat.