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Frontier Life tells the story of Tijuana - a young city that doesn't really have one. The film vacillates between three non-sequitur subplots: amateur drag racing, the city's sewage problems, and the invention of Nortec (a musical movement that conflates techno and norteno, a cousin of mariachi). Tijuana's seamy underbelly is exposed clinically, unflinchingly, as if it were the Byzantine Empire, which makes it both curious and dry. But the film is prettily made and offers an original concept, which ultimately rescues Frontier Life from a fate in the documentary discount bin.

- Meg Van Huygen