Gabriella Garcia Pardo on ‘Fenced,’ Named Most Promising U.S. Doc at Ji.hlava Film Festival: ‘There’s Something Funny About Human Obsession With Control’
Gabriella Garcia Pardo, whose “Fenced” picked up the New Visions Award for most promising U.S. doc at Ji.hlava Film Festival, talks to Variety about the project, which focuses on something we barely notice yet know only too well: fences, which protect or divide. Depending on whom you ask.
“It’s not so easy to say they are good or bad, or that we can easily create a world in which we erase all these lines. They also create a sense of home and as someone who has always searched for a sense of belonging, I identify with that,” the director tells Variety.
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Born to Colombian parents, she grew up in Miami, a place “deeply rooted in borders and boundaries.”
“It’s full of immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean, so this feeling of being in between spaces was always very present. The root of this film has to do with our relationship to the land and to one another. It’s broken – in so many ways.”
In “Fenced,” she interviews all kinds of people. Including Jason Baldes, the head of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, and the members of the American Fence Assn.
“I didn’t want to create a shallow sense of heroes and villains, ‘cowboys and indians,’ the North and the South. The U.S. is an easy place to simplify into stereotypes and yes, into lines, and that’s in direct contrast to the whole film.”
She’s striving to make an “accessible” film.
“I want the audience to be able to relate to these people. In one of the storylines, we’ve been following a group that collects barbed wire. One of them [Delbert Trew] runs the Devil’s Rope museum. He, and other enthusiasts like him, have a deep, deep love for their land and you can feel that. But it’s sitting on this contradiction that in order for them to have a home, it was violently taken away from somebody else.”
To Garcia Pardo – and the people she’s talking to – fences represent violence and control, but also care.
“There’s something funny to me about our human obsession with control and creating rigidity in places where it’s not necessary. Our endeavor to put straight lines onto curved landscapes makes no sense. There’s something darkly absurd about the fact we keep on repeating it.”
Currently looking for broadcast partners in the U.S. and Europe, she’s hoping to bring “Fenced” to cinemas, but also to towns which don’t have film festivals.
“I want people to laugh together and feel uncomfortable together. We would like to make a proper road trip with this film, because everyone has lived their lives surrounded by fences, in one shape or another. It’s set in the U.S., but it’s just our framework: these lines and borders are universal.”
All these months in, she still comes across fascinating stories.
“One fence construction company hired a group of men from Central America to build a fence – six feet away from an already existing one and in front of an abandoned stadium. What’s the point?! At first, they argued it was their job, but then we started to talk about immigration and what it meant for them to cross the border and come to the U.S.,” she recalls.
“There is this line in the teaser: ‘They are not going to make any more land. Some people have it and some don’t.’ Their response to that was: ‘That’s because the rich don’t share with the poor.’ You find all sorts of perspectives on what these lines mean in our lives. Some say: ‘They’re for protection.’ But protection from whom?”
Garcia Pardo will explore fear as well, one that comes with people forced – or choosing – to literally cross the line.
“For me, that comes across in trespassing, which has such a rich and fascinating history. We have been looking for characters who trespass as a way of questioning boundaries,” she says, admitting that expressing such fear “visually, actively and sensorially” has been a challenge.
“There’s this big case about corner-crossing. Some [Missouri] hunters put up a ladder to cross from one side of public land to another [navigating the checkerboard layout] and the owner of the private land on the other corner is suing them for $7 million because they crossed his airspace. He’s coming at them in a very aggressive way. Not with a gun, but through a legal system.”
“Fenced,” produced by Jonna McKone and co-produced by Wenjing Xu, with Sebastián Pinzón Silva credited as story consultant, is scheduled to premiere in December 2026. In the meantime, Garcia Pardo will keep on asking more questions. Or try to come up with answers to the ones she didn’t see coming.
“Someone asked me: ‘Do you think marriage is a fence, too?’ This film has the ability to send you down many, many rabbit holes,” she laughs.
“It just shows you how powerful these boundaries can be, even without a piece of metal or wood that’s signifying the line.”
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