Unwelcomed (2025) ‘Hot Docs’ Movie Review: Gut-wrenching, Indelibly Vital Look at Chile’s Immigrant Crisis

Sebastián González and Amílcar Infante’s “Unwelcomed” (2025) offers a provocative, panoramic deep dive into Latin America’s biggest migrant ordeal. Fleeing persecution and deep-seated economic precarity, millions from Venezuela pour into Chile. Colchane, situated on Chile’s borders, has long served as the strategic gateway into the country. The film immerses us in 2021, right amidst the pitiless resistance and violent spurning in Chile to undocumented immigrants. Embedded in it are anxieties of losing one’s land to foreigners setting up home and community close by. Then there’s Chile’s skewed wealth distribution, with two-thirds of its resources in the hands of a marginal percentage of the elite.

“Unwelcomed” does well to situate the anger, the bitterness fuelling the anti-immigration protests, insecurities stemming from an economy that routinely neglects and disempowers, and puts down those who aren’t well-endowed. Only a small section gets to amass wealth and live an edge-of-parallel-reality, comfortably isolated from the country’s sweeping dire straits. It’s the fear of having the little bit of anchorage one has being usurped by the newcomers that triggers the spate of hostility. Shot by the directors themselves, “Unwelcomed” spans rippling expanses of deserts, coastlines, and highlands through which the migrants flood in and try to build makeshift shelters, ‘improvised tents’. But these remote areas are further exacerbated by the merciless freezing cold.

The local unease in the borderlands is heedless of this bleakness. To many, the migrants are viewed as potential robbers, thieving away stuff from the natives’ land. They can’t at all be trusted and allowed space; instead shoved out. Violence, which is what immigrants sought to escape back home, props up again in gestures of intense antipathy. Where’s the relief one yearns for?

Unwelcomed (2025) — A still from “Unwelcomed” (2025)

There’s great misery and suffering entrenched in the documentary. We witness a staggering degree of the most wretched human conditions. Parents have to reckon with the constant threat of hunger gnawing away at their kids. Starvation looms persistently. Many die away. It’s the kind of poverty that leaves people entirely rudderless, grasping for the barest scrap of dignity. How do we dream when everything we think of humanity is leached to its vestiges, the very bones of survival? Is there any hope in seeing refugees mill around, completely abandoned by the state and pushed out by the places they seek refuge in?

Where are the conditions built for the migrants to transition to their new homeland? It’s as if the Chilean government thought they did their job by letting Venezuelans pass through. What about helping them find a foothold? Nobody seems to have spared a thought. Chile’s border communities are inflamed and raging at the exodus creeping in. We are dropped on the perilous migration routes, filled with swindling. To survive, it demands an extraordinary level of resilience, an almost inhuman capacity to endure the harshest of situations. If one makes it through somehow, there’s the huge fraught reality of trying to assimilate, being permitted into spaces in the new land. Being able to permeate into a new culture and find kinship is its own big, often unwieldy struggle.

The directors are wise enough to place equal emphasis on the dissident cracks within Chile’s populace, the decisive fault lines between those firmly opposing migrants surging in and others demanding a human rights reckoning. “Anyone protesting for social justice is branded a criminal”, one of the voices remarks. Chile is a country that’s pretty used to living with foreigners, another person adds.

So, where does the escalating, seemingly knee-jerk reaction of aggression and suspicion of the migrant stem from? The minority that dares to express alarm and distance itself from the popular ill will toward migrants occupies an uncertain, marooned position. With the ever-accelerating rise of right-wing governments all over, the spurt of viciously fake news, and vitriolic propaganda, the human voice of kindness itself struggles to stay unscathed. “Unwelcomed” is a tremendously moving testament, urgent and piercing. Sensitive, sweeping, and patiently inquisitive, it presents a reckoning that demands immediate intervention, care, and consideration.