Films with: Courtney, Heather

Letters from the other side

Heather Courtney's film 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. The 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 Courtney can carry these video letters back and forth across a border that these women are not legally allowed to cross. Focusing on a side of the immigration story rarely told by the media or touched upon in the national debate, the film 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.

DVD 5122

Trabajadores The workers /

"'We build the buildings, we do the hardest jobs, and still they don't want us.' These are the words of Juan Ignacio Gutierrez, a Nicaraguan profiled in the film Los Trabajadores/The Workers, winner of the International Documentary Association David Wolper Student Award. Los Trabajadores tells the story of immigrant day laborers, placing their struggles and contributions in the context of the economic development of Austin, Texas. Through the stories of Juan from Nicaragua and Ramon from Mexico, and through the controversy surrounding the relocation of a day labor site from downtown to a residential neighborhood, the film examines the misconceptions and contradictions inherent in America's dependence on and discrimination against immigrant labor. As Juan says, 'they say Austin is growing, but thanks to whom?'"--Container.

DVD 5123

Where soldiers come from

In Michigan's snowy Upper Peninsula, job opportunities are few, and friends are usually for life. For Dominic Fredianelli and his high school buddies, joining the National Guard offered a $20,000 windfall and assistance with college tuition--all for only one weekend a month. Little did they know. This documentary follows three of these young men over four eventful years: through basic training and a 2009 deployment to an explosives unit in Afghanistan; to visits with their families while they are overseas; and the rocky return home, without commentary. Focusing on the reverberations of war in small, close-knit communities the film offers a commentary on class, as the real cost of distant political decisions are illuminated, as well as the shame of a country with little to offer its less fortunate young people than a ticket to a battlefield.

DVD 8966