(2012)
Documentary Mini-Short
Length: 7 min.
(2013)
Documentary Mini-Short
Length: 10 min.
From the website:
Two powerful short films that explore contemporary immigration issues in the U.S., The Caretaker and The Mayor are intimate portraits of relationships between recent immigrants, and those who came to the U.S. generations ago.
This film showcases the role of in-home and nursing-home health care workers – caretakers – the vast majority of whom in the U.S. are immigrants. These stories reflect the relationships caretakers they have with their clients, the juxtaposition of their lives, and working conditions for the workers, including long hours, what happens when relief staff does not show up, the intensity of the duties, as well as the tenderness of the relationships that are built between caretaker and client. This film also touches on themes such as the differences and similarities for immigrants of different backgrounds and generations and conditions for immigrants during different periods.
From the website: The Caretaker is a short film about the relationship between an immigrant caretaker and an elderly woman in the last months of her life. Joesy, a Fijian immigrant, works long hours providing live-in care for 95-year-old Haru Tsurumoto. Through intimate and quiet scenes, we explore Joesy’s complex relationship with Haru. The two respect one another, because at different times, both have felt like outsiders in the U.S. – Joesy as an undocumented immigrant who fears she could be sent back to Fiji, and Haru as a Japanese American who was sent to the internment camps during World War II.
This film demonstrates the role of immigration policy has on local communities – one state law and one national, two laws that deeply affect immigrants in a small town in Georgia, but in opposite ways: in 2011, HB87, the racial profiling law in Georgia that allows police to stop anyone and ask for proof of citizenship or immigration status, and; in 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which allows undocumented immigrant youth who entered the country as minors, to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit.
From the website: The Mayor is an intimate portrait of a small-town Southern Republican Mayor and his profound and unexpected connection to a mixed-status family of Mexican immigrants. Paul Bridges, the conservative Republican Mayor of Uvalda, Georgia, speaks fluent Spanish and is integrally connected to the Latino immigrant community in his town. Bridges has been a major part of the Hernandez family’s life for over a decade and many of the members of the family are undocumented. After the State of Georgia adopts harsh anti-immigrant law that make it a criminal act to drive or house undocumented people, Mayor Bridges stands up for his community and the Hernandez family both at home, and on the National stage.