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A US Homeland Security official watches a video of Laura, a Mexican woman whose husband died in 2003 along with 18 others in the worst immigrant smuggling case in US history. "How many more deaths does it take for the US government to do something?" she asks.
Letters from the Other Side interweaves video letters carried across the U.S.-Mexico border by the film's director with the personal stories of women left behind in post-NAFTA Mexico.
Director Heather Courtney interacts with her subjects through her unobtrusive camera, providing an intimate look at the lives of the people most affected by today's failed immigration and trade policies. Her use of video letters provides a way for these women to communicate with both loved ones and strangers on the other side of the border, and illustrates an unjust truth - as an American she can carry these video letters back and forth across a border that these women are not legally allowed to cross.
As the U.S. Congress and Senate debate this divisive and heated issue, tossing around band-aid approaches such as building a 700-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Letters from the Other Side provides the human context that has been missing. Focusing on a side of the immigration story rarely told by the media or touched upon in our national debate, Letters offers a fresh perspective, painting a complex portrait of families torn apart by economics, communities dying at the hands of globalization, and governments incapable or unwilling to do anything about it.
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""A much-needed examination of the collateral damage of illegal immigration, Letters from the other Side gives voice to the women and children left behind -- sometimes forever -- when Mexican men cross the U.S. border looking for work. Sensitive treatment of an overlooked issue should make it resonate." John Anderson Variety
Full Review:
A much-needed examination of the collateral damage of illegal immigration, "Letters From the Other Side" gives voice to the women and children left behind -- sometimes forever -- when Mexican men cross the U.S. border looking for work. Sensitive treatment of an overlooked issue should make it resonate among a wide, and widely diverse, TV audience. Documaker Heather Courtney was attracted to the story for two reasons: Her previous film "Los Trabajadores" (The Workers) concerned immigrant farm labor in the Southwest; and she was moved by the death in 2003 of 19 illegals who suffocated in a tractor trailer. Courtney's question -- what about the survivors? -- is answered with overwhelming sadness. "Nobody leaves because they want to," says one woman, and all the political noise about predatory immigrants and porous borders falls away like scales.
Using the technique seen in Carlos Bosch and Josep Maria Domenech's 2002 Cuba-American docu "Balseros," Courtney records the women -- notably a wife and mother named Eugenia -- and takes the tapes to the United States. She also tapes Eugenia's husband and son, and brings the tapes back to Mexico. It's a very effective and emotionally potent device, with the tears on both sides very real. Reality however, precludes easy answers.
Two of the women -- Carmela and Laura -- lost their husbands in the May, 2003, tractor trailer tragedy, and, in one scene, Laura's video letter is viewed by a functionary at the Bureau of Homeland Security. "How many more deaths does it take for the U.S. government to do something?" she asks.
Predictably, the bureaucrat has no answers. But it's encouraging that Courtney is asking her questions.
Heather Courtney Heather Courtney is a filmmaker, cinematographer and photographer based in Austin, Texas. Her recently completed Letters from the Other Side, which uses cross-border video letters to tell the immigration story from the perspective of the women left behind in Mexico, premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in January, screened at the South by Southwest International Film Festival (SXSW), and was funded by a Fulbright and grant from the Independent Television Service (ITVS). It is currently screening all over Austin, Texas at community-based venues with support from a grant from the City of Austin.Her previous film, Los Trabajadores/The Workers, won the Audience Award at SXSW in 2001, and was broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2003. In addition, it has screened at over 40 national and international film festivals and conferences, as well as at countless grassroots screenings in conjunction with immigrant rights groups all over Austin and the rest of Texas. She is currently producing the Texas segment of a national PBS documentary on the health insurance crisis.Prior to receiving her graduate degree in film, Heather spent eight years writing and photographing for the United Nations and several refugee and immigrant rights organizations, including in the Rwandan refugee camps after the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
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