Gabriella Garcia Pardo, whose “Fenced” picked up the New Visions Award for most promising U.S. doc at Ji.hlava Film Festival, talks to Variety about the project, which focuses on something we barely notice yet know only too well: fences, which protect or divide. Depending on whom you ask.

“It’s not so easy to say they are good or bad, or that we can easily create a world in which we erase all these lines. They also create a sense of home and as someone who has always searched for a sense of belonging, I identify with that,” the director tells Variety.

Born to Colombian parents, she grew up in Miami, a place “deeply rooted in borders and boundaries.”

“It’s full of immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean, so this feeling of being in between spaces was always very present. The root of this...