ArtPower!Film is pleased to present our first ever blog dedicated to a first time documentary filmmaker, UCSD graduate poltical science student Alex Ruiz. An important ArtPower!Film mission is to foster the talents of emerging ucsd filmmakers. Our hope is that you will engage with and learn from Alex’s creative journey – his trials and tribulations as he brings his idea to fruition. Alex and his crew will post images, clips and comments on a weekly basis.
The Treatment
About the Documentary Film:
This documentary seeks to present a humanized perspective on the problem of illegal migration from Mexico to the U.S. There is a dehumanized narrative surrounding this issue that objectifies illegal immigrants as criminals. It is the main point thesis of this documentary that this conception fails to acknowledge the complex political-economy at the center of the problem.
Almost everybody is winning out of this situation: migrants and their families in Mexico live better, corporations are making record profits by having access to cheap labor, which in turn allows the U.S. to maintain a competitive edge in the world economy (read China or India), American consumers are better off having lower prices in the supermarkets, and the Mexican government has an exit valve to an otherwise socially explosive situation. This context makes it almost hypocritical to point-fingers at immigrants and reduce the problem to a criminality debate. The documentary also acknowledges the fact that there are, for sure, losers in this game. There is a very real competition of labor that affects working-class American families, and the documentary also explores their points of view. Finally, it seeks to inform the debate surrounding illegal migration by presenting facts about how many illegal immigrants, because they have to work using fake documents, also pay their taxes, so they are not the leeches some anchor people portray them to be.
Migrants are not their stereotype. There is a human drama underlying each one of them, and there is a corresponsability between Mexico and the U.S. to do something.
We want to portray the humanity beyond the stereotype, the invisible, the job-taker, the alien. We do not wish to accentuate the problem, but rather influence how people in both sides of the river perceive the problem.
Biographies
Alexander Ruiz Euler – Director / Producer
Alex Ruiz is a political science PhD student at UCSD. His background as a documentary filmmaker is null, and he is stepping into these turbulent waters out of the conviction that both human excellence and misery are hidden in the daily events of our lives. Also, he realizes that his life as an academic falls short of his desire to understand this hide-and-seek because we sometimes grasp life better when it is narrated in a screen -and not necessarily through statistics.
Although he currently lives in sunny San Diego, he was born and raised in Mexico City, making him an average neurotic chilango.
Jon Wetterau – Director of Photography
Jon Wetterau is a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer who has produced two films and worked on many others in different parts of the world. Jon was born and lives in Queens, New York and studied filmmaking with Adolfas Mekas at Bard College in the 90s. He is currently pursuing an MFA at Hunter College.
Jon’s most recent production “Doual’a: A Portrait of Three Quartiers” (2007, 54 mins.) is a glimpse of different sides of life in the commercial capital of Cameroon, Douala.
He has worked on his own short films including: “The Road from New York to CentroAmerica” (1997), a personal film about a road trip to Costa Rica; “Keep It Moving” (2000), the story of three New York City bicycle messengers and “Moving to Mexico” (in progress), a film about American gentrification in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He worked for Ashim Ahluwalia on the award-winning films “Thin Air” (1998) and “John and Jane” (2004) as well on Susan Kaplan’s “Three of Hearts”(2006), Paul Korenkeweicz’s “Stephen Pace: Art Through a Life”(2000) and Suzanne Schulz’ “Modern Times: Building Community in America’s First Suburb” (2001).
Jon is committed to projects that explore how world events have more of an impact on peoples’ lives in the 21st century.
Chuk Moran - Editor
Chuk Moran studies cultural systematics of new media at UC San Diego's PhD program in Communication. He designs interactivity affordances in the inter-disciplinary mashup performance format in continued development by the Kamza and Bar Kamza Project of UCSD. He continues outsider work in children's books, video, audio cutup/mashup, painting, cooking, and clothing design.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home