The United States: a country of immigrants, the melting pot, where streets are paved of gold and opportunity is waiting just around the corner. We hear these expressions so often and we envision a glamorous immigrant experience as we look back at history. However, the true story of these immigrants is rarely told and is often ignored. Tufts Alum David Riker (LA '85) tackles this issue in his 1998 film La Ciudad (The City), which aims to tell the true story of immigration. The film will be screened at 7 p.m. tonight in Pearson 104 as part of Tufts' Latin American Studies program.
The idea for the film began when Riker arrived in New York City to attend film school in 1991 and was surprised by what he saw in the city. "I knew that immigration on a global level had reached an unprecedented level over the last 20 years," he said. "I realized that the immigrant worker, or the way I like to put it, the uprooted person, is no longer a marginal character. The uprooted person is now the central subject of our time."
Riker made it his mission to tell the story of the "uprooted person." He had himself been moved around many times in his life, moving to Belgium and then to London where he grew up surrounded by immigrants from all over the world. It was here that his interest in the immigrant situation and in filmmaking was cultivated.
"My interest for making films is not just to entertain but to deal with social and political issues that I think are vital. I couldn't ignore the fact that immigrant communities in the US were under great attack and were experiencing not only racist or discriminatory attacks, but fundamental attacks on their civil rights."
Many of us forget that apart from Native Americans, everyone in the US is an immigrant. Despite this, in the '80s and early '90s the immigrants have been unjustly taking the blame for certain problems in this country. In reality, immigrants have played a major role in contributing to the economic life of the United States.
Riker realized that "it seemed that yesterday's immigrants had decided to condemn today's immigrants as if yesterday's immigrants had some sort of more legitimate right to be here - that was the genesis for making the film."
Riker took a non-traditional approach to making La Ciudad. Since he was not a Latino immigrant, nor did he speak Spanish, he did not want to impose his ideas of the immigrant experience. He instead allowed the voices of the immigrants to come through. He wanted the voices of the film to be the truthful representation of those who have lived this experience.
To accomplish this, Riker's first step was to learn Spanish and to educate himself about these immigrant communities. He then had to build a sense of trust between him and his actors. By committing himself to a cast consisting primarily of non-professionals in the leading roles - that is, people who live the reality that the film portrays - Riker was able to tell a more truthful story.
"I wanted the immigrants themselves to be the actors. It seems like a small choice but it had profound consequences," he said. "Most people don't feel that they have the right to be up on the big screen, that the big screen is reserved for the big names. I don't believe that. I believe that each person's story is somehow essential, somehow relevant, and getting people to tell their story is not that difficult, but getting people to believe that they can be in a movie and convey their own life is really difficult."
To accomplish this goal, Riker held dramatic workshops that helped those immigrants playing major roles in the film to overcome their inhibitions about playing these roles as well as recognize that their stories were important. Riker wanted them to believe in themselves and to know that they were really the best ones to tell their stories. These workshops were the place where these stories were born and where these non-actors learned that they could be actors.
"The first challenge was to get people's minds liberated from Hollywood. We all carry these ideas about what a story is and what a movie is and what an actor is, and we're always made to feel that we don't belong, that our story is not worthy enough, dramatic enough, or that our voice is not legitimate. The first thing was to work with people and establish that their stories were extremely important. The workshops were a lot of fun; they were filled with laughter and games along with difficult and painful moments as well." The result of these workshops was a synthesis of many different tales that fused into the four main stories that are told in the film.
This film has accomplished even more than what Riker had expected. It has been screened all over the US and to a lesser extent in Europe. "It has helped to advance the argument that immigrants are human beings, it has been a tool used by the immigrant rights movement, and it has been an effective tool," he said.
Riker emphasizes that the film cannot stand alone; instead it must be a means for people to understand the immigrant experience as a first step to ending the exploitation and discrimination that these people suffer.
For these immigrants, seeing their life story up on the big screen has provided a sense of empowerment. Many women who worked in the garment sweatshops have never been able to tell their children about what they did at work because they did not want to talk about what went on. This film shows the difficulty and courage it takes to work in such an occupation in which low wages and constant abuse are normal. For the first time, these women could communicate to their families through the film about what their daily life is like.
"It was an amazing, life-changing process, and what the film has accomplished has been because of the people in the film," Riker said. "It really belongs to and reflects hundreds of immigrant men and women. This is the significant part of the film."
