AMERICAN NIGHTMARE:

Two powerful films at Sundance explore the dark side of the immigrant experience

 

By Sean P. Means

Friday January 23, 2004

 

    PARK CITY -- The American dream is frequently on display at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival: the life of love-starved 20somethings in "Garden State" and "Easy," the liberty sought by suffragettes in "Iron Jawed Angels" or the pursuit of happiness exercised by the daredevil surfers of "Riding Giants."

 

    But two of the most powerful discoveries at Sundance, the drama "Maria Full of Grace" and the documentary "Persons of Interest," are stories about people from other countries drawn to that American dream, with dire consequences.

 

    In "Maria Full of Grace," a 17-year-old Colombian girl (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno) becomes, out of economic desperation, a "mule" -- a drug courier smuggling pellets of heroin in her stomach. It turns out to be a bad bargain, as Maria risks arrest if she is caught, violence if the drug thugs don't get their product, and death if one of the latex-wrapped capsules breaks in her digestive tract.

 

    Though the movie's subject matter may seem off-putting, writer-director Joshua Marston succeeds in making Maria sympathetic by showing how few choices are open to her.

 

    Marston told the audience at his film's first screening here that his interest in narcotraffickers sprung from "a personal obsession" listening to immigrants' tales of how they came to the United States.

 

    "To hear the story first-hand from someone who had done it was incredibly moving," Marston said.

 

    Marston, a Southern California native who learned film at New York University, made the movie in Spanish -- casting many of the roles in Colombia and filming, because of the danger of Colombia's 40-year civil war, in neighboring Ecuador.

 

    Though Marston is American, co-producer Jaime Osorio Gomez (who also plays the drug lord who puts Maria on her dangerous journey) said at the Q-and-A, using Marston as translator, "I felt it was a script that could have been written by a Colombian."

 

    Orlando Tobon, a community leader in New York's "Little Colombia" who plays a similar role in the film, said the movie "was so real, and it doesn't exaggerate anything." Tobon, Marston said, has worked over the last 20 years to get the bodies of some 400 "mules" killed by their drugs home to Colombia.

 

    Marston said he had wanted to make a movie about America's war on drugs. But as the script came into shape, Marston said, "I couldn't make a movie about the drug war -- I had to make a movie about the girl."

 

    That kind of human dimension is what makes "Persons of Interest" so compelling. In this documentary, directors Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse interview 12 families touched by the U.S. Justice Department's panicked arrests and detention of 5,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants just after the World Trade Center attack.

 

    The immigrants' stories vary, but have a similar pattern. The tale of Palestinian-born Nabil Ayesh is only slightly more harrowing than the average.

 

    Ayesh was stopped at a traffic light in Philadelphia on Sept. 11, 2001, asked by the police officer if he was Arabic, and then arrested. His own lawyer did not know his whereabouts for 52 days.

 

    His wife and four children -- one born in Palestine, one born in Jordan and two American citizens born here -- were deported to Palestine. Ayesh was incarcerated one year and 17 days, and never charged with any crime. He got a working permit and a contractor's job. He was arrested again last April, when police in Syracuse, N.Y., pulled over a speeding car in which he was a passenger. He was deported to the West Bank, reunited with his family.

 

    The project was instigated by The Documentary Campaign, a production company founded by screenwriter Lawrence Konner ("Mona Lisa Smile") to make documentaries promoting social justice and human rights.

 

   Producer Daniel Massey and Adem Carroll, who had worked with grassroots groups trying to help the post-9-11 detainees, did the research and found the families.

 

    Konner approached Maclean and Perse, who have been a couple for four years, and who have different but complementary film backgrounds -- Perce is a documentarian and a former editor at Rolling Stone, Maclean is a Canadian-born filmmaker best known for the 1999 drug-addiction drama "Jesus' Son."

 

    Maclean and Perse interviewed the families over a three-day period at the end of Ramadan in 2002. The shoot culminated with a meal to break the Ramadan fast -- a chance, Maclean said, for the families to share their experiences with each other. Some of the families remain in contact.

 

    The interviews were done on a stark set, with white walls, a window and a bench.

 

    "The idea was to build a set that has a sense of being a very stripped room," Perse said. "It's like a jail cell, but it might also suggest a house."

 

    Indeed, when Ayesh describes how he got sunlight through his cell window until Day 80, when a prison crew painted it over, the false window on the set becomes quite real.

 

    The bare set cuts away a layer of filmmaking artiface, said Maclean. "It draws you right into their stories," she said.

 

    Intercutting the interviews is footage of public statements made by Attorney General John Ashcroft, coldly defending the Department of Justice's aggressive arrest tactics. Perse criticized Ashcroft's approach to fighting terrorism, which, he said, "is predicated on the idea that the U.S. Constitution can't be legally applied to non-citizens, that the U.S. Constitution is an apparatus that just protects citizens."

 

    Perse said he and Maclean considered getting an on-camera interview with a government spokesperson, but opted against it.

 

    "So much of this is about the humanness, and the human cost, of these arrests," Perse said. "To cover both sides of the politics of it [was] beyond what was necessary to tell the story of these people."