documentaries – The Concordian

My husband and I watched “Living Undocumented,” a show on Netflix about illegal immigration in the United States, for the same reason we like watching people trying to crawl out of debt: some sort of warped guilty pleasure we share.

We wanted to feel good about our mediocre existence and compare ourselves to people who had a long journey ahead of them. It wasn’t a sick act – we weren’t mocking, but rather seeing how far we’d come; from the headache of filling out dozens of applications, ordering official documents and multiple interviews, to waiting anxiously for the results we couldn’t be sure about. If we weren’t accepted, it would upend our lives.

My husband’s Canadian citizenship ceremony was happening the next day, after nine years of our own hike across the land of bureaucracy. We both have a Brazilian background; I moved to Canada with my family at three years of age, and he arrived as an exchange student when he was 18 years old. It finally felt okay to be excited, and we decided to be reckless and get a taste of what the very first steps felt like.

We watched the first episode, then another, until it was 1:30 a.m. We wouldn’t go to sleep until we finished at least one more. What we expected to give us peace, made us doubt if my partner’s ceremony would happen at all.

I expected it to be bad, but my ignorance as to what constituted bad was quite juvenile.

It was as if I had been irresponsible in thinking everything would go smoothly. Without giving blatant spoilers, I learned about the unfairness of the US Border Patrol. For example, I didn’t know they could negotiate peaceful terms involving an undocumented family meeting another family member one more time before they get deported without being deported themselves, only to take it back , and put the visiting family members into indefinite imprisonment at the detention camps. Another thing that shocked me was that US border Patrol could physically assault lawyers representing undocumented immigrants without any immediate repercussions.

It was not just the difficult decisions they had to make — it was the spirit they felt from their community; the constant struggle between wanting acceptance but never being able to reveal yourself.

All this doesn’t compare to how surprised I was to see that under the Trump administration’s Zero Policy, every single undocumented immigrant is treated the same, and can be deported at any time. That means undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes in the country are treated the same as one that is law-abiding and a constructive member of their community through their work and family. The policy forbids any official who oversees the undocumented immigrants to exercise discretion or determine what consequences are appropriate based on the immigrants merits, sometimes allowing for leniency, such as allowing them to stay in the country, or even have a driver’s license, if the individual has contributed constructively to their community and has no police record. Instead, all officials have to apply a predetermined punishment, in this case deportation or detention at an internment camp.

This means undocumented immigrants who have willingly checked into Border Patrol agencies throughout the years, paid taxes, are raising their families with their kids going to local schools, and have never committed a crime, could be deported at any moment.

The friendly relationship between the agency and the people wanting to live a better life had come to a terrible end: mothers and fathers having to say goodbye to their children, decade-old careers abruptly ceased.

I couldn’t help but wonder, what if we weren’t safe from this? What if all it takes is one government worker interpreting the law in their own way, destroying everything we worked for?

These nine years of our own process to citizenship were challenging, not because we were undocumented, but because it escalated to a lengthy trial where my partner had to win in order to apply for citizenship. On the day of the verdict, the judge said how impressed he was with my husband because he had represented himself in court, and won. This was an incredible victory; we were overjoyed and relieved. But it also became an event warranting suspicion; the trial proceedings and outcome had to constantly be reviewed throughout the application process.

While I am not at liberty to divulge all the details surrounding the case, it ultimately meant we had one more hurdle to overcome. Before the ceremony, all applicants have to go through a final verification process, meaning everything that occurred during the process had to be reviewed one final time. We were worried: could the person behind the desk use this as a reason to postpone us from crossing the finish line? On the day of the ceremony, neither of us spoke about it. I prayed for the best, and started thinking about a calculated reaction to the worst.

As the day progressed from the initial anxiety to the reassurance of the judge’s welcome, to sitting and witnessing my life partner swear the oath as a citizen of Canada, I realized I never had anything to worry about. There was a pride and unity that filled the room, a rhetoric that went beyond integration — there was open praise for our different backgrounds, and that as people we would add our culture to the fabric of Canada’s history.

Our victory felt bittersweet knowing how hard it is for others to work for years, only to have it taken away. We had finally made it, and I can only feel an abundance of gratefulness: for my country, for this nation of people who are accepting, and that we can now officially call ourselves a Canadian family.

Graphic by @sundaeghost

Envisioning inclusion and documenting the imagined future of marginalized groups

At first glance, ‘Documentary Futurism’ might seem like an oxymoron—if the future has yet to happen, how can it be documented in the tradition of nonfiction storytelling? In their newest project, Cinema Politica seeks to answer that question the way they know best; through the creation and sharing of radical, independent documentaries.

“We came up with this idea of documentary futurism through being inspired by all of the Indigenous film programming we’ve been doing, in collaboration with Indigenous filmmakers and curators,” said Ezra Winton, co-founder and director of programming of the Cinema Politica film network.

“It’s bringing together documentary conventions and ideas of speculation and the imagination, even the fantastical.” Winton noted that, while nonfiction and speculation has been brought together in other forms, the combination has largely gone untouched in the documentary world.

Enhior:hén:ne [Tomorrow], directed by Roxann Whitebean. Enhior’hén:ne explores Mohawk children’s predictions about the state of mother earth 200 years into the future.

“The idea of being forward-looking with documentary has partially come out of 15 years of programming documentaries where the vast majority have focused on the past and the present, and the future part is always just the last 10 minutes,” said Winton. “We’re more interested in the whole thing being more forward-looking and that means not just envisioning inclusion, but ideas about social justice.”

After receiving the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) New Chapter grant, the project itself started to shift from an imagined future to a reality.

“We called [the CCA] right away to ask, is this just to celebrate, or can this be critical?” recalled Winton. “And they told us they’re calling it the New Chapter for a reason. That they’re more interested in critical perspectives and less about national chauvinism.”

Project coordinator James Goddard came on board not long after, bringing with him knowledge of afrofuturism and experience working in the interdisciplinary speculative arts.

Enhior:hén:ne [Tomorrow], directed by Roxann Whitebean.

Goddard points to the work of Indigenous futurism and afrofuturism, the latter having garnered much attention since the recent release of Black Panther, as the driving force behind the new genre. “[People] are interested in the ways in which marginal groups tell stories about the future,” he said.

“The importance of that, especially for Indigenous groups in Canada, is that there have been literal legislative maneuvers right up until the 90s that the government was doing to erase Indigenous people, to eradicate the possibility of a future. So when Indigenous people tell stories about their presence in the future, it’s an important form of resistance. And that’s true of almost every marginalized community that has experienced a history of erasure.”

Cinema Politica put out a call for film proposals in September 2017. They received over 70 applications, which were then passed on to a panel of jurors for deliberation.

“It was doubly experimental because we removed ourselves from the selection process too,” added Goddard. “Had we played more of a role in the actual selection process, more of our pre-existing ideas about what we wanted from the project would have bled into that.”

We might have been heroes / Nous aurions pu être des héros, directed by Andrés Salas-Parra. In a world with nothing left to mine, communication has become the main resource for humanity to exist. The challenge? To stay connected.

Among the jurors is Nalo Hopkinson, a prolific author of six novels, including Brown Girl in the Ring, which Goddard described as a “landmark text for speculative fiction and afrofuturism.” Joining her is Skawennati, a media artist whose work addresses the past and present from an Indigenous perspective, and award-winning filmmaker Danis Goulet, who produced, wrote and directed the film Wakening, a source of inspiration for the project.

The jury deliberated based on their collective interpretation of the project goals, finally arriving at the 15 films commissioned to inaugurate the new genre. “There’s a lot of variation in the themes they deal with. Obviously a lot of the films deal with environmental collapse, one film in particular focuses on exploring sexuality and gender variants, there’s a film that looks at corporate culture, and a number of the Indigenous films engage with the idea of what happens after the settlers leave,” said Goddard.

“We really encouraged the artists to interpret it as they wanted to, politically, aesthetically, everything. We just basically set the canvas, and even then the edges of the canvas can still unfurl,” said Winton. “My expectations were just that this was going to be interesting and hopefully, probably, amazing. And my expectations were met.”

In the tradition of Cinema Politica, Winton hopes the films will not only start conversations about the alternate realities they present, but serve as a catalyst for grassroots social movements unafraid to look towards an imagined, brighter future. “We’re always tackling present, day-to-day issues, and that’s important, but also imagining a post-capitalist, post-colonial, post-gender binary, post-whatever it is, it’s exciting and it can be politically transformative.”

Featured film still from Lost Alien, directed by Tobias c. van Veen.