‘The Garden We Dreamed’ review: Mexican migrant drama puts lyrical, affecting spin on a well-worn genre

Dir/scr: Joaquín del Paso. Mexico. 2026. 102mins

The third feature from Mexican director Joaquín del Paso finds arresting beauty amid adversity, and hope amid the hard knocks of the migrant experience. A turbulent past in earthquake-wrecked Haiti is hinted at, but now Esther (Nehemie Bastien) and Junior (Faustin Pierre) have found each other. With Esther’s two young daughters in tow, they are travelling north and planning for the future. Their shack in a remote Mexican forest is a temporary rest stop but Esther makes it into a home, while Junior works for an illegal logging operation. But their peaceful existence, like the forest itself, is fragile. 

Finds arresting beauty amid adversity

Del Paso’s previous films include Panamerican Machinery, which premiered in Berlin’s Forum in 2016, and 2021’s The Hole In The Fence, which launched in Venice’s Horizons strand, and won Best Picture in Cairo. Following its premiere in Berlin’s Panorama, The Garden We Dreamed should, at the very least, match the warm festival reception of the director’s previous pictures and is distinctive enough to catch the eye of arthouse distributors or curated streaming platforms. 

There is no shortage of films that deal with refugees’ stories, but many of them focus on either the trauma of the journey or the Kafka-esque administrative struggles to secure documentation once they arrive at their chosen destination. Far fewer offer moments of stillness and reflection, which makes the first act of this sensitive portrait of a newly-found family unusual and affecting. The journey that Esther and Junior have undertaken is as much about discovering and cementing their relationship to each other as it is about reaching a geographical destination. 

The generous widescreen cinematography captures the visual impact of the forest, but it is through the expressive sound design, by Lena Esquenazi and Valeria Mancheva, that we understand the true character of the place. This is particularly effective at the very beginning of the film. It’s dawn in the forest, and the camera peers through the murky half-light in a long panning shot. But while we can’t see much, we can hear everything – the soundscape is teeming with bird life, and punctuated by percussive thuds that suggest that the woodland has its own innate rhythms.

In the distance, we see headlights and then a pair of roaring trucks haul into view. The sound of the vehicles, and the shouts of the labourers that pour off them, feels like a physical assault on the peace that came before. This is not, the film cautions, an instance where humans and nature exist in harmony. 

The labourers include Junior in their number; their job, which is rapidly and rather shoddily concluded, is to clear a patch of land and build the hut where Junior and his family will live. He is charged with maintaining the road and shooting any outsiders who get too close to the covert logging activities further up the hill.

It’s a rough-hewn little shelter, but Esther threads wild flowers into the cracks between the planks and lights up the space with her smile. Outside, in a sunny glade, the children, Flor (Kimaëlle Holly Preville) and Aisha (Ruth Aicha Pierre Nelson), find that the air is thick with Monarch butterflies. It’s perhaps a metaphor for their precarious existence – the insects are undeniably beautiful, but also all too easily crushed. 

The tone shifts as time passes. Junior is coerced into wielding a chainsaw on the work site to pay off a supposed debt to the foreman of the logging operation. Flor’s asthma, aggravated by the rain that seeps through the roof of their dwelling, gets progressively worse. Esther’s smile dims as she alone grasps the gravity of the threats that they face. And the picture takes on the ominous tone of a survival thriller, with the story increasingly driven by Esther’s courage, strength and her faith that a better life for all of them is just around the corner.