A Brief Review of Narco Mennonites

I posted earlier about being excited to watch Narco Mennonites, a documentary on Crave about a family of Mennonites who are involved in drug trafficking, and figured I should follow up with thoughts after watching the series:

• Initially I thought it was longer than the 3 episodes available on Crave, but it turns out it's just those 3.
• The first episode has ~5 minutes of preview of the whole series for some reason which felt odd given that we'd already decided to watch it. It feels like the "Netflix-ification" of shows.
• There's intense background music pretty much the whole show which gives it an uneasy, anxious energy.
• The interviews felt fairly minimal, other than the 3-5 main characters they talked with.
• I wish they had connected it to the larger Mennonite community in some way, but I'm guessing people aren't too keen to talk on camera knowing that it's still an ongoing thing.
• Video footage was often repeated during segments (i.e. 3 guys being hauled up the stairs for questioning), which made me wonder if they lacked budget or footage (or both?)
• It felt like there was a lack of a through line in the storytelling. It seemed to be more of a random scattershot of stories told, often by what turned out to be unreliable narrators, without a strong thread to tie it all together.
• My mind is still boggled at the idea that you can get drugs across the border when the rest of us are paranoid about taking too large a container of eye contact solution across.

I'd still recommend checking it out if for no other reason to learn how one part of the drug trafficking operation runs, particularly if you're not aware of Mennonite involvement. I'd heard stories over the years of Mennonites trafficking drugs, mainly legend about the wheels of cheese being used to traffic (which are true apparently?), but hadn't ever seen a proper documentary on it.

In terms of documentaries on Mennonites trafficking drugs, it's the best I've seen. 😉 But I don't feel like it was a great documentary, but I'm empathetic to how difficult it might be to get people to talk in front of a camera about the topic as well as get enough funding to have the time and space to produce it to the vision someone might have for it.