Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico, share a border on the Rio Grande River. The towns also share an uncommon harmony, where community and commerce (and cattle) coexist across countries. But all is not quiet on the western front as the region faces a threat that looms in the distance like an oncoming thunderstorm. Trouble brews in the form of drug cartel violence, as northern Mexico’s epidemic of intimidation and murder creeps into the sister cities’ periphery. At the center of the film are two hardworking throwbacks, the amiable and unflappable mayor of Eagle Pass, Chad Foster, and tireless cattle rancher and father Martin Wall. Their responses to the tumult are captured by brothers Bill and Turner Ross (45365) in a highly textured and thoughtfully observed vérité treatment, featuring a fittingly ruddy and rugged palette. As literal and figurative walls emerge, a foreshadowed yet mysterious tragedy occurs, and the landscape is changed forever. Cleaving is paradoxically defined as acts of bringing together and also of tearing apart, a contradiction much like the effect of fear on these communities that have not previously known it.  TM