Cleaved in two by the U.S.-Mexico line, the city of Nogales has long been divided. Nestled along the southernmost edge of the Arizona Sun Corridor, the desert community is a rarity — even among border towns. Only 20,000 Americans (give or take, these days) reside in Nogales, Arizona. That’s compared to more than 260,000 Mexicans living across the border in Nogales, Sonora. It’s common to see local families, biological or otherwise, meeting daily at the boundary.
“They’ll bring chairs and drinks and food and they’ll stay there for two or three hours. They’re all just people from Nogales,” said Oscar Rene Coronado, a filmmaker and the director of the upcoming Nogales International Film Festival (NOGAIFF). “They won’t tell you where they’re from. They’ll just say they’re from ‘Ambos Nogales’ or ‘both Nogales.’ That always caught my attention.”
The two groups living in parallel are separated by a steel fence, razor wire, border patrol, and, sometimes, a movie screen. Coronado’s film event, which has been ongoing mostly annually for over a decade (but got a new name this year), returns to the U.S. and Mexico from April 28 to May 4, 2025.
The festival’s signature offering, known as Film on the Fence, is back too — allowing audiences from both halves of Nogales to watch movies for free as they’re projected on the border wall, simultaneously.
“Art can break down the barriers we as humans build between ourselves,” said Coronado, describing the novelty screening format as a kind of cross-cultural portal. “We’re talking about unity. We’re talking about community. We’re talking about bringing two places together that are separated, and the way we bring them together is by putting everybody in the middle of that separation, right where everything actually starts separating. It’s very impactful.”
Founded in 2010 as the Santa Cruz County Film Festival, and later known as the Borderland Film Fest until 2023, NOGAIFF was started by Samuel Saunders. The art collector was a former event coordinator for the Morelia Film Festival in Central Mexico, Coronado explained, and Saunders envisioned Nogales as the ideal backdrop for building a fresh tradition. The city’s duality influenced his contribution to local arts culture, and that history is at the core of what Coronado and his film festival continue to champion today.
“It was important for us that we shine a light on Nogales as a cultural hub,” said NOGAIFF coordinator and filmmaker Francisco Javier Landin. “We believe the potential is here to become a destination that people can really consider when they make movies, when they throw festivals, when they talk about art, when they make music. Nogales already has all of that. It’s just getting outside of that ‘border’ stigma.”
“Any border town like it is really going to have a bad reputation,” agreed Coronado. “People don’t see the importance of these communities as communities, and they don’t realize how many artists are already here. They will not put their eyes on places like Nogales because they’re just so afraid they’re dangerous.”
In its most recent travel advisory for Mexico — last updated in September 2024 under the Biden administration — the U.S. Department of State recommended avoiding the broader state of Sonora but specifically said Americans could visit Nogales. The city is a major center for trade and retail.
Far from harrowing, setting up for Film on the Fence mostly sounds complicated. Not only must Coronado and Landin synchronize showings and audiences across two countries, but there’s also the issue of managing equipment during travel. Bouncing between the U.S. and Mexico, the cinephiles say they’ve learned to keep the heaviest hardware on the Arizona side and send only a projector, screen, and sound system to Sonora. The organizers said that choice can save event volunteers an agonizing wait at U.S. Customs. Travel through Nogales, they said, is always slower coming back from Mexico.
In the late 19th century, festival parade routes roamed freely through the centers of both cities. Amid a mountainous landscape, described by Coronado and Landin as great for location scouting, the city has been at the mercy of Mexican/American relations for centuries.
A wire fence, erected along the countries’ demarcation line from 1910 to 1918 (supposedly as a precautionary measure taken during times of relative peace), was flimsy and non-confrontational. Still, it made history following decades of tension in the region and was labeled “most likely the first permanent barrier to control movement of people across the U.S.-Mexico border” by The Smithsonian.
“Visually, it is really stunning to see the difference between one side and the other — to see the wall cut through the hills and to think that it’s just one block separating these two towns,” Coronado said. Remarking on the ‘50s and ‘60s architecture of the suburban neighborhoods on the U.S. side (“You can really see when the boom happened there,” Landin said), the men paint a cinematic scene. It’s one where the unified people of Nogales stay the same, and instead see their split city change at the border.
“Even the lighting, how the lighting looks at night, you can see different colors,” said Coronado. There’s an orange hue to the sodium streetlamps used in most of Mexico, Landin said, and American LED lights tend to look more “greenish” or blue. That real effect has been (somewhat problematically) evoked using sepia for decades in American film, but as Landin sees it “that’s really the only distinction” in Nogales.
“There’s this deep sense of home that these people have between each other, even when there’s a border wall,” Coronado said. Not every local agrees about the wall and what it means politically, of course. But, the director explained, “They all believe that this is one community and they should be together. In some sense, no one living there really wants Nogales separated the way that it is.”
Asked how the American and Mexican governments have reacted to their potentially controversial film festival in recent years, Coronado described officials from both countries as “very helpful” and “enthusiastic.” NOGAIFF has had “no trouble” securing its required permits or paperwork, the director said. Although, Landin noted, “We’re not naive.”
The coordinator continued, “We can obviously see what’s happening in the government. We’re just focused on creating our community right now. If we need to worry about that, we will worry about that.”
On January 20, President Donald Trump returned to the White House and unleashed a slew of executive orders that swiftly reshaped the American political landscape for immigrants. Those included 10 major actions — each reinstating or advancing immigration policies from Trump’s last term. The President has once again declared a national emergency at the border, and the Department of Defense sent an additional 1,500 active-duty service members to the southern half of the country last month. Trump has fast-tracked and expanded deportation efforts, limited temporary protected status for refugees, revoked funding for “sanctuary jurisdictions” in the U.S., and established travel bans among other efforts. The Trump administration now faces opposition from several judges and a series of lawsuits questioning the constitutionality of many policies.
“Personally, I have always been very much about the rights of immigrants, having been one myself,” said Landin. The coordinator described immigrating across the desert to the U.S. when he was just six years old. Landin told IndieWire he lived undocumented for much of his childhood, and now resides in Tucson, Arizona — having gained American citizenship in his early twenties.
“Normalization is the key when it comes to acceptance in my view,” he said. “With this festival, we’re hoping to normalize Nogales to the outside world and help people really see other people. Remind them, ‘You’re not just looking at the border, you’re looking at a community.’ That’s how you make real change.”
“We have these moments at this festival together, and it doesn’t really matter what comes before or after them,” Coronado said. The NOGAIFF director is also a Mexican immigrant who lives in Arizona, and has been a U.S. resident for 22 years. “Sometimes that’s all the experience you get to have. But we must keep supporting art. We must support culture. We must support film. We have to, have to support film.”
Outlining a list of heartfelt goals for what’s technically the first-ever NOGAIFF this spring (and an equally ambitious agenda for its parent organization, the Southern Arizona Film Society, in coming years), the two creative partners are warm and buzzy. Exploring their dream to offer arts educations to Nogales youth at no cost, then getting excited about their festival’s opening night red-carpet gala, then urging curious Hollywood professionals to come see what the city and festival have to offer, Coronado and Landin make Nogales sound if not whole — singular.
The organizers are still accepting film submissions for their upcoming event, and emphasized the importance of finding major defenders for their mission going into 2025 and beyond. In a follow-up email to IndieWire, Landin shared concerns about several U.S. grants that have been helping the festival and could be threatened by a different Trump executive order rolling back federal funding for DEI programs (i.e. those related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility). That order has significantly impacted the art world and represents a new challenge for creatives in places like Nogales.
“The future of arts funding is unclear at this point but we will not deviate from our belief that diversity has a positive impact on all art forms, including film,” Landin wrote.
Speaking with IndieWire, Landin and Coronado said they hoped to program NOGAIFF 2025 with plenty of movies not about U.S.-Mexican relations or the immigrant experience.
“We’re trying to create a bigger festival that goes beyond border issues,” Coronado said. “We want to avoid that condescending tone of telling people from Nogales about the types of problems they’re living constantly. If somebody knows what’s happening in their town, it’s the people from Nogales. And though it is important to bring those subjects to light and talk about them, it’s also important to entertain people, to create culture, to help people dream, to help people laugh.”
The organizers are working to figure out free refreshments to entice attendees into their outdoor theater, and describe themselves as willing to “pull out all the stops” for serious industry support. In past years, they’ve had roughly 100 people on the American side and 300 on the Mexican side. The multi-day event has showings at more traditional theaters, as well as networking events, panels, receptions, and several musical performances. But NOGAIFF leadership knows better than most: If anything will bring Hollywood to Nogales, it’s the very movie screen that divides the city.
“If you have a film and you want to come down and see it played on the border wall, then we could definitely accommodate that,” Landin said, employing major directors to consider Film on the Fence.
“We just need the people that want to support us, and the people that want to help us,” Coronado said. “The idea is there. The event is there. It’s been happening for over 14 years, give or take with the pandemic. But it’s been happening — and it’s going to continue to happen, even bigger.”
Links to get involved with the Nogales International Film Festival (April 28 – May 4):
