December 10, 2025: "The Long Walk of Carlos Guerrero" with filmmaker Joseph Mathew

Our Borderlands Literature & Film Circle (BLFC) December interview is with award-winning filmmaker Joseph Mathew-Varghese, whose video "The Long Walk of Carlos Guerrero" has won the 2024 Best Picture (Domestic) and Best Performance at the Skiptown Playhouse International Film Festival. It also received a nomination for Best Feature Film at the Arizona International Film Festival.

You can rent the film on Amazon Prime and view it before our interview.

Click here to register and receive the Zoom link. 

In the early 2000s, Mathews saw an article in the New York Times about the rising death toll of migrants in the deserts of southern Arizona. Being an immigrant himself, the story moved him. On a whim, he flew to Tucson and spent the next three years making the documentary “Crossing Arizona” (Sundance 2006), a wide-angled snapshot of what he saw and experienced along the Arizona - Sonora border.

In Sonora, Mathews met Central Americans who had fled political and gang violence and were about to make the dangerous crossing through the desert. In the vast Tohono O’odham Reservation, he followed Mike Wilson, Tohono O’odham humanitarian who was on a solo mission to stop migrant deaths by creating water stations in desolate areas.  In Southern Arizona, he met ranchers who were angry with migrants cutting fences and entering their property in search of water.  And then there was the ascendancy of the Minutemen, an armed right-wing militia group, patrolling an “invasion” at the border. Above all, he experienced firsthand how the U.S.’s border enforcement policies were driving migrants into the most desolate areas of the desert resulting in the deaths of many.

From that time, Joseph secretly nurtured the idea of making a fictional film about a migrant’s journey of survival through the desert that would composite real immigrant stories and his own personal experiences into a single narrative.  Many years later, his friend Carlos Garcia died suddenly of cancer in New York Carlos was Anthony Bourdain’s sous chef for many years at Les Halles Brasserie and eventually succeeded him as the Executive Chef. Carlos was from Puebla, Mexico and had started as a dishwasher, working his way up the hardscrabble rungs of New York’s restaurant scene to become the Chef of a popular French brasserie. Carlos once told Mathews that during the time he was an undocumented line cook, he was unable to see his family in Mexico for over a decade.

This realization of the secret trauma that many undocumented immigrants and their families live through, inspired Mathew to make his protagonist a New Yorker, taking the ultimate risk to go back home to visit an ailing parent. The film would be about his journey back home to New York, crossing the border all over again to get back home to his wife and child. The story would be a true reflection of the status and vulnerability of many immigrants in this country, framed within the narrative construct of a survival thriller.

The filmmaker Joseph Mathew-Varghese was born and brought up in Kerala, India. After he immigrated to the U.S. in 1994, he eschewed a career in Finance to pursue a lifelong covert dream of becoming a photographer and filmmaker. After a brief stint as a photojournalist, he ventured into long-form story-telling. His second documentary, “Crossing Arizona”, examines immigration through the lives and actions of the people living along the Arizona–Sonora border. It premiered at the Sundance Film and was awarded the One Future Prize at the Munich Film Festival.