Is it drama or melodrama when the narrator’s voice tells us that there are other dangers involved apart from being apprehended by the border patrols, and it speaks of people being forced to carry drugs across, of being abandoned as part of some shakedown and the possibility of encountering some of the recently formed militia groups who have sprung up ostensibly to volunteer assistance to the police, whether it’s wanted or not? One of them, a rancher, appears on-screen standing in front of a cut fence as if it is the portal through which every immigrant has entered since the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers. He’s talking about a flood, of disease and crime, of potential terrorists, about an economy that can’t support any more outstretched hands. And he’s a patriot, and there’s a growing number just like him, because if something doesn’t change then it’s going to be too late. As he’s talking I can’t help thinking of Tom Buchanan’s advocacy of The Rise of the Colored Empires – strange how often moments in books still permeate my consciousness. But he’s not a man to be sniggered about and you can tell that, unlike Buchanan, his hands have earned everything in the world he owns.

The clock is ticking. It’s time to make the crossing. But first we see their father from behind, standing in an open doorway, one hand held high on its frame. So he’s waiting, waiting with an open door, and then we’re cut from that exterior shot of blue sky and in a shadowy world of pixelated faces so it’s like some parody of The Blair Witch Project, and subtitles are used to capture the few words that are spoken and there is no voice-over so it feels as if we’re separated from any familiar external world and are fully in only what we can discern from the grainy, jerky images. At times it resembles nothing so much as a shadow puppet play. And not for the first time I start to wonder about what Corley is doing and if he has any understanding of the potential danger that he has put this couple in. Later on a little research reveals the film generated its own in-house controversy when it was intimated by unnamed sources that the father, brother and sister were all actors, and I had a sudden memory of that night in Saigon when he told me he didn’t know the difference any more in what was true and what was made-up.