'Mija' Review: A Personal & Sincere Look At The Struggles Of Undocumented Families [Sundance]

Beginning on the eve of music manager Doris Muñoz’s 26th birthday, Isabel Castro’s lyrical documentary, “Mija,” uses Muñoz’s story — both her status as a manager of Latinx artists and as the only American-born member of her undocumented family  — to explore the complicated dynamics that plague undocumented families. Adopting a fly-on-the-wall approach that prioritizes Muñoz’s subjectivity — sometimes to a fault — “Mija” is nevertheless a personal and sincere portrait of Muñoz’s struggles, and her ability to adapt in the face of changing social and professional upheavals.

Those changes begin almost immediately within the film, as Muñoz’s professional career as the manager of an up-and-coming singer/songwriter, Cuco, dissolves. After having traveled the world touring for a few years, and reached relative financial stability, Muñoz returns back to her home with little indication of why she no longer works with Cuco or what she should do next. Despite her relatively young age, she is also the main wage-earner within her family, as her parents struggle to find job stability with their status as undocumented workers. Further, Muñoz is also the only one who can travel across the border to visit her brother Jose, who was deported to Tijuana. 

READ MORE: Sundance 2022 Preview: 20 Must-See Movies From The Festival

Her struggles to balance her family and career constitute much of the narrative, which turns about halfway through as both COVID begins to loom, and Muñoz finds a new singer/songwriter — Jacks Haupt — that she wants to represent. A throwback R&B singer, Haupt is also struggling to her assert her own artistic voice and balance the personal needs and professional desires of her undocumented family. The two bond over their shared Chicana heritage, as Castro draws parallels between their lives, and the complicated relationships they have with their parents. 

But, “Mija” is less interested in using Muñoz, or Haupt, to explore the rise of Latinx artists, or the ways that COVID affected such a career. Instead, the film rarely leaves Muñoz’s side as she moves about her daily life. This intense focus allows the film to present a fuller portrait of Muñoz and her day-to-day struggles, but occasionally obscures the reasons for many of her decisions. 

Larger events — the dissolution of her creative partnership with Cuco, the effects of the COVID pandemic on music, the story of Jose’s deportation — hover around the margins of the film, as Castro foregrounds Muñoz, for better and sometimes worse. The subjectivity is punctuated by Muñoz’s voice-over as she grapples with the turns of her professional and personal relationships — often pulled from diary entries — but context is occasionally missing. We’re never given insight into why Muñoz is forced to make a career pivot, and Haupt is introduced late in the film. Her life in Texas before her eventual transition to California to make an album is truncated, as the parallels between her and Muñoz’s lives are teased out but never being fully foregrounded. 

Such a singular, focused study seems to be a feature, not a bug, of Castro’s intimate approach, allowing Muñoz the narrative space to process her emotions in real-time. Castro’s lack of editorializing narrows in on the minutia of Muñoz’s life — her trips to Tijuana, how she uses social media to find Haupt, the process of recording an EP — in a way that simultaneously keeps us within Muñoz’s world but distances from the larger forces that Muñoz and her family are forced to contend with.

However, by the film’s end, which culminates with an emotional FaceTime call between Muñoz and her parents best left unspoiled, Castro opens up the “Mija’s” point of view by focusing on the sacrifices that Muñoz’s parents made for her to live out her dreams. After spending so much time watching Muñoz hustle, it’s a profound and tender end for a film that is so invested in narrativizing Muñoz’s personal experience. While occasionally too insular, “Mija” resists a more simplified structure or the narrative pull to condense Muñoz and Haupt’s lives into archetypes. [B+]

Read along with all our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival