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Austin filmmaker's 'The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez' debuts on PBS

Kieran Fitzgerald a first-year fellow at Michener Center for Writers.

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, July 08, 2008

For the past several years, budding Austin filmmaker Kieran Fitzgerald has been working so intensely on his first documentary film that he sometimes feels he's living with a ghost — the ghost of Esequiel Hernandez Jr., a gangly American teenager who grew up 200 feet from the Texas-Mexico border in the town of Redford, near Presidio.

Fitzgerald never knew Esequiel, not in life. But he can tell you how he loved to draw and dance, how his teachers admired him, how he had a gentle touch with animals. He can tell you how 18-year-old Esequiel was watching over a herd of goats, rifle in hand, when U.S. Marines in desert camouflage shot and killed him near his house on May 20, 1997 — mistakenly thinking he was a drug trafficker.

"I felt I lived with Esequiel for three years," says Fitzgerald, 28, who spent months at a time in the vicinity of Redford (population 100) while working on the documentary between 2004 and 2007. "It was often spooky, haunting in the emotional sense, to be so close to where all this happened, and at the same time to be charged with honoring someone's life so accurately.

"When you make a movie about someone's life — especially if you never get a chance to address that person, or ask him if it was OK with him — yeah, you take on a certain burden," adds Fitzgerald, a first-year fellow in the Michener Center for Writers, the University of Texas' master of fine arts writing program. "You are in relation with a ghost in a way. So you've got to maintain a high standard for yourself, because you're trying to do justice for a person you were never able to talk to."

Fitzgerald's intimate, empathetic approach is one of the most distinctive features of "The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez" — which premieres at 10 tonight on the national PBS series "P.O.V." — even as the documentary considers so many political, historical, even psychological facets of the Hernandez tragedy. In Fitzgerald's hands, it's a tale that invites a wide array of emotional response: outrage, sorrow, regret and even forgiveness for some of the four Marines who forever carry the memory of that day.

From the start, Fitzgerald portrays Esequiel Hernandez as a forgotten casualty of America's border war on drugs in the 1990s. He reminds his viewers that Hernandez was the first American citizen to die at the hands of active military since the Kent State massacre of 1970. Implicitly and explicitly, his film asks the question: Why were combat-ready troops with M-16 rifles lurking about in the desert, in secret, so close to a civilian community — and what's to prevent such a tragedy from happening again, in the spirit of protecting the borders in the war on terror?

At the same time, Fitzgerald brings a tender, poetic sensitivity to this hard story — laying bare the irony of how a young man who so admired Marines was killed by a Marine disguised as a bush. "It does have a very literary quality to it," says Fitzgerald. "And that definitely attracted me."

Kieran Fitzgerald came into the world the same year as Esequiel Hernandez, but he grew up in a completely different social universe. He was born in New Hampshire, raised near Boston and educated at Harvard, where he earned a degree in English. His father is film producer Michael Fitzgerald, whose production credits include "Wise Blood," "Under the Volcano" and 2005's "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada."

Fitzgerald first heard of Esequiel Hernandez while working for his father near Marfa on the movie set of "Three Burials," a fictional film directed by Tommy Lee Jones that drew upon some circumstances of Hernandez's life and death. With encouragement from Jones, Fitzgerald began work on his own documentary when production closed on "Three Burials." (Jones later agreed to narrate Fitzgerald's film).

As a shoestring director, Fitzgerald had a job description that was all over the map. He dug through local TV news archives, uncovered unseen video footage of Hernandez's funeral, brushed up on his Spanish, conducted interviews while holding his own camera. Through the Freedom of Information Act, Fitzgerald eventually obtained government film from May 20, 1997. Surveillance footage shows Hernandez wandering in a landscape of ocotillo and desert brush in 6 o'clock sunlight in the moments leading to his death.

In this dramatic footage, the four Marines spot Hernandez with his rifle and radio their observations to a dispatcher. At one point, Hernandez fires his rifle into the desert — the suggestion is that it's an idle shot, though the camouflaged Marines report they're receiving fire. When Hernandez walks toward his house, the Marines follow him. Minutes later, Cpl. Clemente Bañuelos fires the shot that kills Hernandez. Bañuelos, who later testified before a Texas grand jury in Marfa but was never charged with a crime, maintained that he shot Hernandez after seeing him point his rifle at one of his fellow Marines.

Yet for all the power of this archival film footage, Fitzgerald's present-day interviews — with Hernandez's family and three of the four Marines (Bañuelos didn't participate) — are the soul-foundation of his documentary as the camera captures so many facets of grief. Viewers are not likely to forget the faces of the Marines, whose moods shift from pride to rationalization to denial to the deepest regret. All of them have clearly aged more than a decade in the past 10 years.

"Talk to me. Tell me my team leader is a murderer, that he did this and that. ... It means two squirts of (urine) to me right now, what you think," Cpl. Roy Torrez vents at one point, alluding to Bañuelos. "When you're done, I'm going to tell you to take a nice deep breath. You enjoy that deep breath, right? Because that's the freedom we give you, that the Marines and soldiers and Navy — the guys who are dying right now — give to you."

Yet in other moments, Torrez and his companions reveal in both overt and subtle ways how deeply the experience has hurt them. In the end, Fitzgerald invites the viewer to see them as victims, too. He goes deep, psychologically, considering how people who value camaraderie, group objectives, can let that allegiance stand in the way of logic and humanity.

"I felt like I was watching these guys go through something very important. It was a very cathartic experience for them," says Fitzgerald, "and I believe it helped them work through it by talking about it. ... These men hadn't talked about it at all with their family and friends. They'd been separated from each other within the Marine Corps. So this was an opportunity to tell the story — and I think anyone who is hanging on to something that's eating at them is going to give in, eventually, to the storytelling influence."

As a first-time documentary filmmaker, Fitzgerald is clearly touched at witnessing so many personal journeys through the lens of his camera. He sees his craft, in many ways, as conciliatory in function. Fitzgerald likes the idea of people having conversations, respecting other points of view, through the medium of film. Consequently, he admits he'll be holding his breath tonight, awaiting the reaction of the Marines, hoping they feel they've been portrayed fairly and compassionately – even as he nods to the ghost of Esequiel Hernandez and makes clear the senselessness and sorrow of his death.

"Documentary is kind of a dance between intent and accident. You're always at the whim of life every time you turn on the camera," says Fitzgerald. "That's the hardship of it, and part of the fun. In this case, we came out with a product that felt like the emotion that we started with — and that's very rewarding to me, as a director, because I felt our initial emotion as the right one. It was just a question if life was going to affirm it. And it did."

bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967