By Erin Pangilinan

Film short The Other Way Around and documentary 9500 Liberty

The Other Way Around  

Director Geoffrey Quan paints a relatable fiction story of Lucy, a Pilipina American immigrant who believed she was ‘legal’ until the death of her parents two years prior to facing deportation. Lucy tries to marry her best friend’s fiancée to keep her legal status in the U.S.

Quan says his film short is based on the Cuevas family from Fremont, California, one of the ethnoburbs in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more about in an old article I wrote here. (Factcheck correction: on Dale Cuevas being targeted for a crime)

“In the 80s a lot of families coming with small children and toddlers, a number of these families chose not to tell their children that they’re here that illegally. As a result of 9/11, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) Homeland Security cracking down, many of these children were learning about these status as adults when INS literally, show up at your door and say ‘you have 60 days to leave the country.’ Because they left at such a young age, had no recollection of where they come from, they all primarily spoke English. The genesis [was] the idea of these people who had self-identified as Americans, saw themselves as having to reconceive their identity.”

Quan also says “Thousands of illegal immigrants come into the United States every year, and thousands more are turned back. It is easy to see only statistics, to compartmentalize and abstract such information as concerning only “the other.” “The Other Way Round” personalizes the abstraction, and in the glare of the divide offers a very haunting and human look at that which is most universal, love – the bonds between friends and family, and Lucie’s struggle between selfish and selfless love.”

9500 Liberty

Eric Byler and Annabel Park give an insider look into the immigration debate of Virginia’s Prince William County where their Board of Supervisors vote for a local policy that allows police officers to question any person they believe to have “probable cause” to be an undocumented immigrant.

Civil rights and immigrant rights advocates have fought against racial profiling and the Department of Homeland Security’s 287g programs, a federal program which deems local law enforcement and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) to report ‘criminal illegal aliens’ to be reported to the proper authorities. According to Byler, many arrests and deportations were “attributable to 287(g), which, [the County] entered into without controversy.  It was the Immigration Resolution, the “Probable Cause” standard, and the period of political and racial discord that accompanied them that led to the social and economic train wreck depicted in our film.” 

Eric Byler cited the congressional failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform creating the ripple effect of immigration problems like the ones in Prince William county spreading across the country.

Annabel Park, said the that movie provided the example of Prince William County as “what happens when you take an enforcement only approach to immigration policy.”

She continued, “we really need to look at the entirety, whole picture and how everything is so interconnected and acknowledging how integrated immigrants are regardless of their status, frankly economy does not distinguish between legal and illegal. They own homes, have jobs contribute to economy, and when you drive them away it affects entire economy. We need to approach this acknowledging that.” 

Park, who is a South Korean immigrant, hopes that Asian Americans become more involved in the movement for comprehensive immigration reform. “I would say that during the filming, I realized that immigration is unfortunately miscast as a Latino issue.  It is an American issue.  It’s true that politically Latinos are often in focus, but there is only one law and Asian Americans and all other immigrant communities are directly affected by our immigration policies.”  

Both The Other Way Around and 9500 Liberty give a glimpse into the lives of children affected by immigration policies. 

The Other Way Around shows an immigrant child forced into ‘voluntary departure,’ back into the Philippines, which she does not remember. She tells the INS she has never committed crimes in her life while they accuse her parents of buying her Social Security number as well of other fraudulent crimes.

9500 Liberty opens with an anti-immigrant man screaming anti-immigrant rhetoric. Park defends that the young children who are with them ‘legal.’ Park later comments on how young children testify for their immigrant parents before the Board of Supervisors in the debate.

The two films focus on immigration is no accident for the DC APA Film Festival. While Washington, D.C. is at the center of politics, the films, which are based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Virginia show the clear urgency for reforming immigration policies that locally impact our communities.

Watch other films of the DC APA Film Festival.