Apprehension table, 2008

It is night time: two men are near a chain-link enclosure, beyond which an old Volvo is parked, its headlights on. They dig in the ground with their bare hands, freeing a series of rectangular packets wrapped in cellophane. Background noises indicate a nearby highway, or perhaps an airport. The first frames of Drive Thru #1, 2007, by Matheus Rocha Pitta capture the viewer’s attention, presenting an action that has the sense of something illicit. We seem to be witnessing the transfer of a drug shipment in a frontier area, perhaps between Mexico and the United States, judging from what one can glimpse from the car’s license plate. [...]