Coming to America

Filmmakers discuss their compelling look at the lives of The New Americans
Edited for Applause Online by Anna Christopher

On March 29, 30 and 31 at 9 p.m. on WHYY TV12, the Independent Television Service presents Kartemquin Films' The New Americans, a seven-hour documentary miniseries that follows four years in the lives of a diverse group of contemporary immigrants and refugees as they journey from their homelands to start new lives in America.

In the style of Kartemquin's classic basketball film Hoop Dreams, the series provides an intimate portrait of five families before they leave their homeland or refugee camp and subsequently wear the defining label "immigrant." Capturing their emotional departures from Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Palestine, India, and Mexico, the series then follows these individuals through their first pivotal years in America.

The New Americans offers a dramatic look at who is coming to the United States and why they are leaving their homelands. Above all, the series gives viewers a chance to see immigrants and refugees not as strangers in our midst, but as people who share the same dreams and hopes as native-born Americans.

In the following interview, producers Gita Saedi, Steve James and Gordon Quinn talk about the making of the series, the continual hardships experienced by modern day immigrants, and what they sincerely hope viewers take away from this program.

Q: How were the subjects chosen for The New Americans?
A: Gita Saedi (Series Producer): We began talking to documentary filmmakers across the country with somewhat similar styles to that of Kartemquin, and an interest and background in the subject of immigration -- two directing teams are immigrants themselves, and all have made films dealing with the immigrant experience in the past.

Finding each of our subjects was rather serendipitous -- more or less through contacts and cold calls. Through meeting after meeting with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, we found the Ogonis being resettled in Chicago. Through the L.A. Dodgers we found the Dominican baseball players; and the Palestinian story by getting the word out in the Palestinian community in Chicago. Director Indu Krishnan traveled back to her home state in India to find our Indian subject; and director Renee Tajima-Pena brought us the Floreses, a Mexican family she was following for an existing project on labor for Asian Women United.

Q: It must have been hard to narrow it down to just five stories.
A: Steve James (Executive Producer): The immigrant experience is so rich and varied, we could have told 12 different stories and still not captured it in any comprehensive way. We decided in our meeting that we would try and find stories that reflected, as best we could, the racial, geographic and economic diversity of the present immigrant population. We also wanted to find subjects with a range of reasons for coming to America -- to flee persecution, to follow a dream, to reunite a family -- so that we cast the net as widely as we could around the contemporary American immigrant experience.

And an important aspect of the series was that we find subjects with whom we could start filming before they became immigrants. We did not want to pick up their stories here and look back on their homeland, but rather start there before they made this often tumultuous and life-changing journey.

Q: What were some of the things you discovered during shooting that surprised you?
A: Gordon Quinn (Executive Producer): The strong sense of loss and pain that is a part of leaving the place and culture that you know.

Saedi: I agree. The deep histories of every immigrant and refugee, and the pain and complex decision of leaving your homeland. Also, the endless ties to the homeland that, even after many years, will always be with them.

James: I was also profoundly moved by the sense of isolation our subjects felt so acutely here. In all our stories, our subjects came from cultures with strong senses of family, culture and religious belief. Once they arrived here, they often felt adrift in a society that -- by comparison -- seems cold, secular and alienating. It is one of the ways that the series can help American viewers look anew at their own society through our subjects' eyes.

I was also surprised by just how difficult the contemporary immigrant experience remains. We tend to think that the past barriers of racism, insensitivity and xenophobia have been struck down. Our series shows that is not the case.

Q: What do you hope that viewers will take away from the series?
A: Quinn: I hope they see that today's immigrants are part of this country and part of its future -- that their hopes and dreams for their families are like those of families who may have immigrated generations ago. We wanted to put a human face on immigration. In a world in which much attention is paid to the globalization of goods and services, we want viewers to see the human face of globalization.

Saedi: We hope viewers will take from the series a better sense of what it means to be an immigrant in today's world. By telling such disparate stories, a viewer would have a hard time stereotyping the immigrant community at large. We want to humanize the experience to viewers -- to see that the hopes, dreams and obstacles that the immigrants in The New Americans face are deeply connected to their own human experience.

James: I think we also wanted to make a series that immigrants here would watch and connect to, a series that tells their stories both intimately and epically at the same time. By interweaving such a rich variety of immigrant stories, we hope the series will help American viewers understand just what a complicated experience being an immigrant continues to be -- that "melting pot" is both true and not true.

We live in a country in which we have long had a love/hate relationship with immigrants. They are viewed with pride as melting pot success stories and feared as people who are so different from us that they will undermine our society. The contemporary immigrants' hopes and dreams are not just like those of immigrants generations ago as Gordon says, they are basically the same as for Americans today. Yet, as this series shows, immigrants still face the added burden of racism, barriers of language and culture, and loneliness.

For more information about the film and the families featured, visit the program's companion Web site.