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The ultimate motivation of migration is not economic or political: it is simple human dignity - the desire to live a dignified life. To take often life-threatening risks to migrate across international borders requires great motivation; when immigrants searching for a better life ultimately find that their dignity continues to be denied, our whole society faces a grave political, economical and social problem. THE CITY/LA CIUDAD was produced by David Riker to offer a respectful view of immigrants, reflecting the dignity and strength of the Latin American immigrant community living in conditions of exploitation and loneliness. Riker spent five years in dramatic workshops with the actors, most of whom are themselves struggling immigrants. "My job as a director was to create a space that was safe for my actors," he says. "The non-professionals are often here without papers and their experience in New York has been hostile. They live with a certain level of fear of deportation, and they are abused throughout their time here. They never deal with a white person except in situations that are hostile - either a cop, an immigration agent, or a boss. I had not only to earn their trust, but also to show them that they could feel safe. Safe not only to come out of the shadows of the city, to stand in front of the light, but more than that, safe to open up and talk about their most intimate stories with strangers." The stories are set in New York City, but could have happened in many other places in the United States or the world. Filmed in black and white, in Spanish with English subtitles, the program tells four fictional stories of Latin American immigrants living in New York: day laborers who are paid to gather bricks from an abandoned lot, struggle to save one who is crushed by a wall that collapses; a young man from Mexico meets a girl from his home village at a Sweet 15 party, then loses her in the maze of a housing project; a homeless puppeteer dreams of a better life for his daughter, but cannot enroll her in school; a sweatshop seamstress needs money for her daughter's medical treatment, but her employer has not paid her for more than a month. Most of the actors are non-professionals and are themselves struggling immigrants, bringing understanding and realism to the film. THE CITY/LA CIUDAD is a vivid and moving portrait of the reality of the immigrant experience for many who arrive with dreams and hopes and find themselves working hard, but staying poor. It injects humanity into a debate that has made demons out of working families struggling to survive - a debate which has largely ignored the voices and images of immigrants themselves. The program takes age-old themes of work, love, struggle, and community, and paints a world of pain and hardship - a world much like the one that faced the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and the Russians not so very long ago. It shows the same beautiful hope reflected in the newcomer of today, not arriving through Ellis Island, but sharing the same motivation for leaving their homeland - economic hardship, political persecution, war, or the desire to be with family. Sweatshops, poverty, and abuse await them just as it did their predecessors. THE CITY/LA CIUDAD shows us a completely modern world in which there is no such thing as an eight hour day or bathroom break, a world in which school is not available for all children and parents face the pain of separation from their families. Producer David Riker hopes that people will come away from THE CITY/LA CIUDAD with a different and deeper understanding of and identification with recent immigrants. "The vast majority of people in this country have had the family experience - of coming from somewhere else, arriving here and being treated as an exploited workforce, not knowing the language, dealing with the profound dislocation of being uprooted. I hope this program is a denunciation of xenophobia, the fear of the outsider. But the final sequence is meant to go one step further, when we see all the faces and portraits of this community. I deliberately tried to choose a series of faces that was very diverse, with the hope that people will see themselves in one of those faces, someone that doesn't look too far removed from themselves, or someone they know." Next |
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