La Americana

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Filming the "changing planetary order"

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A New Film Focus on Immigrants

movies are shifting from the journey itself to the issues that crop up after arrival, exploring how the changes affect everyone, including members of the affected communities.
By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 14, 2008

IN COURTNEY HUNT'S absorbing new feature film "Frozen River," an Upstate New York blue-collar mom decides to take a job in one of America's hottest growth industries: people smuggling.

Not that Ray (Melissa Leo) is very clued in about why so many illegal immigrants are risking their lives trying to slip into the United States or has much sympathy for their plight. Juggling a harried life that includes two kids, two jobs and an absentee gambler husband, Ray has enough problems of her own without worrying about the Chinese and Pakistani refugees she's shuttling in the trunk of her car across the Canadian border.

"If they want to come here so bad they should take the time to learn English," Ray blurts out at one point to her partner in malfeasance, Lila (Misty Upham), a wry Mohawk Indian laboring mightily herself to make ends meet.

What remains unsaid in this subtle, perceptive movie, is that Ray actually has more in common than she realizes with her desperate human cargo. Like them, she occupies one of American society's lower socio-economic rungs. But history and cultural conditioning have taught her to think of immigrants as aliens, sub-humans, the Other. The movie's power derives in large measure from Ray's belated recognition of a deeper, common humanity she shares with these exiles.

The representation in American movies of immigrants (and of two close relations, ethnicity and "race") is practically as old as the movies themselves, from "Birth of a Nation" and Charlie Chaplin's "The Immigrant" to "Crash" and "Under the Same Moon." Today, as mass immigration has evolved into a global phenomenon, a growing number of filmmakers in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as the United States are probing immigration's causes as well as its consequences for the lives of ordinary people.

Macro yet micro

SEVERAL more Hollywood movies slated to open this fall and winter will explore immigration themes, whether explicitly or covertly. They include "Towelhead," a drama directed by Alan Ball (an Oscar winner for the "American Beauty" screenplay), set during the Gulf War, about a 13-year-old Arab American girl sent to Houston to live with her authoritarian Lebanese father; and Wayne Kramer's "Crossing Over," a multi-story ensemble drama about immigrants of several nationalities trying to gain legal status in Los Angeles. The marquee cast includes Harrison Ford, Sean Penn, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd.

In a way that's characteristic of many of these new films, "Frozen River" has a global perspective but an intimate focus. Its view of immigration is less anchored in large-scale political abstractions than in the nuanced emotional relations between its very specific characters and situations. It has nothing to say directly about, say, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Instead, it looks at immigration as a dual exchange in which the American characters are as impacted as the foreigners by their brushes with each other.

That reflects Hunt's belief that, in the post-Sept. 11 era, Americans gradually are awakening to the complex, challenging world around them. "We live in a very narrow-minded place," she said by phone, referring to the United States. "The world is getting smaller, and even in the interior of America we're going to learn a lot about the other people coming in."

"Frozen River" isn't the only recent movie to suggest that global immigration and cross-cultural encounters are shaping American attitudes, both at home and abroad. In films such as Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" (2003), the middle-class Americans played by Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, thrown together by fate in Tokyo, are shown to be relatively as disoriented and challenged by a "foreign" culture as any Saharan émigré braving his first Midwestern winter.

In Tom McCarthy's indie hit "The Visitor," Richard Jenkins plays Walter Vale, a stoic college professor whose passion for life after his wife's death is rekindled through his unexpected encounter with a Syrian-Senegalese couple in New York. His dormant emotions are further aroused when the male half of the couple is taken into custody at an immigration center and his attractive mother arrives from Detroit to try to help her son.

'A very tricky issue'

McCARTHY'S research for the movie, which included hanging out in immigrant communities, attending academic conferences and visiting immigrants being held in U.S. detention centers -- mostly innocent young men with no criminal records, he said -- convinced him that "we can do better" as Americans in managing border control. The screenplay provides Walter with a brief, rousing speech about treating people humanely, which he shouts, in frustration, at some detention officials.

But while the movie's sympathies clearly lie with Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), the young Syrian drummer who winds up in custody, "The Visitor" avoids preaching about the politics of immigration, which McCarthy describes as "a very tricky issue." "We need laws, people have to abide by laws, we need to enforce those laws," the director said. "It's a huge, huge, complex question."

Instead of polemics, "The Visitor" offers a gentle plea for opening ourselves up to the unfamiliar, the alien, in life. Rather than being a source of anxiety and confusion, in movies like "Lost in Translation" and "The Visitor" the experience of being an "outsider," whether abroad or in one's native land, is presented as an opportunity for reshaping one's identity while discovering what makes other people tick.

"First and foremost," McCarthy says of his movie, "it isn't just about immigration, it's really about people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different places, connecting . . . whether that's in New York or Beirut or Damascus or Mexico."

Another recent immigration-themed movie that favors the personal over the political is Patricia Riggen's "Under the Same Moon" (La Misma Luna). A more conventional film than either "The Visitor" or "Frozen River," it relates the saga of a Mexican boy's attempt to reunite with his migrant mother working in Los Angeles. Riggen, who is Mexican, said she already had begun filming "Under the Same Moon" in her native country when massive pro-immigration demonstrations took place across the U.S. in May 2006.

"Suddenly it became very timely and very trendy, and Hollywood wanted a movie about immigration," she said. "But you know, we weren't doing it for that reason. I think the movie will allow a healthy debate" about immigration, "very different from what we usually read."

A generation ago, immigration-themed movies such as "El Norte" tended to focus heavily on the often grueling physical journey from an old world to a new one. By contrast, the tendency with more recent films is to move beyond the actual journey and examine what the well-traveled writer V.S. Naipaul has termed "the enigma of arrival" and the thorny process of assimilating -- or not -- to a new culture.

Contemporary immigration-themed movies tend to treat mass immigration as a given, irreversible fact in major Western metropolises such as London, New York and Los Angeles. That doesn't mean the social tensions have vanished, but they may be sublimated and at least partly resolved through the relations between individuals -- especially if those people happen to be in love.

British director Stephen Frears helped introduce this cinematic point of view with two 1980s comedy-dramas about immigrant-stoked upheaval in London, "My Beautiful Launderette" and "Sammy and Rosie . . .," and more recently with "Dirty Pretty Things" (2002), a drama about an African doctor-turned-taxi driver and a Turkish woman trying to survive and steer clear of deportation officials in the drizzly British capital.

Like Mira Nair's "Mississippi Masala" (1991), a romantic comedy-drama that was slightly ahead of its time, the British film "Brick Lane" (2007) depicts immigrants in a limbo of incomplete assimilation. Adapted from Monica Ali's novel, it centers on a young Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), struggling to weather a chilly marriage while living in a dreary council flat in East London. As her own marriage deteriorates, the heroine finds herself drawn to a young immigrant man who becomes radicalized by the anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping Western Europe in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Increasingly, movie makers (especially European ones) are depicting immigration not as a one-way journey but rather as a more or less permanent state of flux between worlds that may seem very different but are, in fact, steadily becoming more inter-connected. In "The Edge of Heaven" (2007) by the Turkish-German writer-director Fatih Akin, the action continually switches back and forth from Bremen to Istanbul and elsewhere as various borders -- physical, political, sexual -- are repeatedly crossed and re-crossed.

From its inception, Hollywood tended to treat immigration themes with caution. The studios were invented mainly by Eastern European Jewish immigrants who created, in author Neal Gabler's phrase, "an empire of their own" that manufactured an idealized version of the United States, largely sanitized of the anti-Semitism and xenophobia that they themselves had experienced.

Americans' attitudes toward expressing their ethnic and national identities -- and accepting those of others -- have changed a lot since the Russian-born vaudevillian Al Jolson (nee Asa Yoelson) donned blackface to play a Jewish cantor's son turned entertainer in "The Jazz Singer" (1927).

Movies, like politics, often lag several steps behind social reality. But at present, they're reflecting a fast-changing planetary order in which both privileged First World frequent fliers and struggling Third World refugees at times may feel like existential nomads, strangers in strange lands.

reed.johnson@latimes.com

link to article

Raw Virginia: http://9500liberty.blogspot.com/

The following is a letter to the editor responding to an article about the 9500 Liberty Project - See blog post "Nativism on Film: The 9500 Liberty Project" from November 3, 2007.


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Stirring a Melting Pot in Prince William
Washington Post
Saturday, November 17, 2007; A16

The Nov. 3 front-page story "Raw Look at Immigration Crucible" described the attempt of filmmakers Annabel Park and Eric Byler to deepen the debate in Prince William County on illegal immigration.

During the past few months, this issue has been promoted as a "crisis" by a county politician, but the debate has been based on no credible, objective information. Instead, it has been an attempt to elicit negative emotions from the residents in a way that divides the community and garners votes for the politician.

Part of this nation's economy has been based on the labor of undocumented workers for decades, if not centuries. Would this have continued for so long if it were not beneficial? We have seen no cost-benefit analysis of the current situation.

It is well documented that it takes three generations for assimilation to occur in immigrant families, yet people are now clamoring for instant assimilation. We have been given no objective information to support this expectation for recent immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

Whenever someone sets out to stir people up based solely on negative feelings, the only one who benefits is the instigator. Ms. Park and Mr. Byler are exposing this issue for what it is, and I applaud their effort.

MARGARET GRIFFIN

Manassas

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/16/AR2007111601829_pf.html

image: taken from Liberty by Peter Max http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images/428/216424t.jpg

Documentary "American Harvest"

This is from a blog post by Angelo Mancuso the producer of the film "American Harvest."

"Politicians and Americans for that matter should take a look at "American Harvest." Its a non-partisan feature length documentary about immigration as it relates to agriculture. It presents the facts as they are without political bias. http://www.americanharvestmovie.com American Harvest Synopsis Anti-immigration sentiment sweeps across America. A journey from Florida to New York, including a trip to the Mexican border, reveals the lives and issues of legal and illegal migrants and farmers working toward a better life. Is the immigration system in America flawed? Immigrants are dying to feed America. American farmers and agriculture rely on immigrants to do jobs that Americans won't do or feel that are simply beneath them. Some only see the problems in the news from the perspective of those extreme points of view of the left and the right side of our political system. Discrimination of immigrants has existed in the United States since the English persecuted the Irish. It was once generally considered that if you were Greek or Southern Italian you were not white. American Harvest points out the inconsistencies of the current policy on immigration. See the changing face of immigrant America as it relates to Agriculture. Follow legal and illegal farm workers and the farmers caught in the middle of a flawed immigration policy."
Angelo Mancuso



http://dyn.politico.com/members/forums/thread.cfm?catid=1&subcatid=2&threadid=187865#188293

Nativism on Film: 9500 Liberty Project

Annabel Park and Eric Byler are a few of many young people around the country who are producing films on immigration. Check out their website: http://9500liberty.blogspot.com/

Raw Look at Immigration Crucible
Pr. William Web Serial Aims to Foster a Deeper, More Civil Discourse

By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 3, 2007; A01

In one video, a man furious about hearing Spanish at a hardware store berates a group of Latino families with a lecture on American history, telling them "my ancestors were here before the Constitution." A little girl shyly reminds him: "The Indians were here before the Americans."

In another clip, a woman asks county officials not to forget "who was responsible for 9/11 -- illegals," while a man tells them, "Don't confuse the 9/11 with the 7-Eleven. . . . The guys at the 7-Eleven just want to work."

Other scenes show worried, frustrated residents denouncing a "foreign invasion" and warning of "civil war," to which one scowling young man taunts: "Bring it."

The illegal-immigration clash that has consumed Prince William County neighborhoods and government halls is now showing up in serial form on YouTube, archived and freely available in all its raw intensity.

The footage, posted by local filmmakers Annabel Park and Eric Byler, is neither pretty nor polished. But the couple adds a chapter nearly every day, offering all sides a chance to be seen and heard, as well as a forum for well-mannered debate to those willing to engage in it.

Park and Byler describe their project as an interactive documentary that aims to defuse tensions and explore the complexity of the issue. Their clips are loaded with the unfiltered emotions that have flooded county streets and county politics, but the filmmakers allow the material to stand on its own, without narration or commentary. A more complete documentary might come later, they say, but for now their goal is to edit and upload the footage as fast as possible to their site, http://www.youtube.com/9500Liberty.

"What you normally do is shoot, then edit, then enter film festivals," said Byler, 35, a Gainesville resident. "On that trajectory, people would see this film for the first time next summer. That's a long time to wait. If the movie is meant to create dialogue, why release it after things may have already shifted?"

With little more than a basic video camera and laptop computers, Byler, Park and a third partner, Jeff Man, have spent the past few months filming Prince William's efforts to enact the region's toughest measures targeting illegal immigrants. Before the county supervisors voted last week to cut off certain services to illegal immigrants and increase immigration enforcement by the police, Byler and Park recorded the session of emotional public testimony, which lasted more than 12 hours.

Excerpts of the testimony have been posted in installments on their site, along with their most-viewed clip, set at the so-called Liberty Wall in Manassas, which has been viewed more than 38,000 times.

The five-minute video tracks the fate of a large banner in Manassas that reads "Stop Your Racism to Hispanics" and hangs from the last wall of a recently demolished house at 9500 Liberty St. -- "at the intersection of Liberty and Prince William Street," the filmmakers note. The banner has been a symbol of the county's tension, as well as a target for it, having survived a dud Molotov cocktail attack only to later be ripped in half by vandals.

"People are writing to us and saying, 'What can we do?' " Park said. "They want to get involved."

Park, 39, was born in Korea but grew up in Houston and Rockville. Before Prince William became a flashpoint for the nation's immigration debate, she led a successful campaign for a U.S. House resolution urging Japan to apologize for the sexual enslavement of "comfort women" during World War II.

Since then, Park said she has declined several job offers from lobbying groups, opting instead to follow Prince William's rocky effort to rid its communities of illegal immigrants. Park said she and Byler, as Asian Americans, are able to bridge the conflict's undercurrent of antagonism between whites and Hispanics.

"We went into this feeling it was about election-year politics and racism," she said. "But the more we learn about it, the more we see how multifaceted it is."

In one video viewed 26,000 times in its first week, a group of Latino children run and play outside the chambers of the Board of County Supervisors, seemingly oblivious to the charged debate unfolding indoors. A Woodbridge high school teacher cautions the board's chairman, Corey A. Stewart (R): "The very people you are trying to oppress today, their children may rise up tomorrow and stand in judgment of you."

For Byler, an independent director whose 2002 film "Charlotte Sometimes" was hailed as a "breakthrough for Asian American filmmaking" by critic Roger Ebert, the roots of the 9500 Liberty project trace to George Allen's calling an Indian American "macaca" last summer.

Byler, the son of a white U.S. Army officer and a Chinese American mother, spent much of his childhood in Burke. He said he was teased often about his appearance.

"Watching George Allen look into the camera and point and say you are not the real Virginia, the real Virginia is the people who are laughing with me at you, reminded me of this whole thing that was never resolved," Byler said.

"I've always been sensitive to situations where people are being singled out."

After the macaca incident, Byler and Park moved back to Virginia from Los Angeles and volunteered for Democrat James Webb's Senate campaign against Allen, helping to raise money among Asian Americans.

Although they worked on a Democratic campaign and their video clips show a sympathy for Latino immigrants' fears about racism and discrimination, Byler and Park have sought to capture all sides of the debate on illegal immigration. One of their most-viewed videos shows a meeting of the anti-illegal immigrant group Help Save Manassas, and others include interviews with Stewart, whose reelection campaign slogan is "Fighting illegal immigration."

"They're really trying to do a service," said George Taplin, director of the Virginia chapter of the anti-illegal immigrant group Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, who appears in two videos about the now-defunct Herndon day-laborer center. Taplin praised the videos' fairness but said he thought the couple's editorial balance was missing in their administration of viewer comments on their YouTube page.

"What I'm seeing as far as the reaction is rhetoric and people calling each other names. That's not going to help anything," Taplin said. "You don't get dialogue going by fanning hatred and discontent."

Like Taplin, some viewers have accused Byler and Park of censorship for rejecting their comments on the 9500 Liberty page. Byler and Park maintain that they are trying to keep the discussion free of hate speech or racism, especially as viewings of their videos have increased and comments have begun arriving from viewers elsewhere in the United States and abroad.

"We don't approve the ones that are going to lead to violence," Byler said. Some of the hate-filled diatribes that arrived in the past week were so disturbing that they notified federal authorities, he said.

Byler says that viewers need to watch several of the videos to understand the larger picture of Prince William's illegal-immigration debate. The clips have appeared on blogs and elicited hundreds of comments. But despite the couple's efforts at peacemaking, there is little sign of reconciliation in their videos, though no shortage of resentment, fear and bitterness.

Still, Park said she is not discouraged.

"I see a lot of hope in this," she said. "Ultimately, the only way to heal the community is to work together to end the fighting and to collaborate on solutions that address the real grievances people have."