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Blogger rlwebb said...

thank you for writing jon- i really enjoyed reading your entry. i can't wait to see the rough cut and i look forward to meeting you. please engage your filmmaking friends in this blog!
--rebecca

March 10, 2009 at 1:54 PM  

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Frijoles and Spam-the DP's story
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
I've worked in various roles in indie films, TV production and made two docus myself. I've dragged cameras all around New York, Bombay and Douala, Cameroun. I've encountered extreme poverty, but I've never spent much time confronting rural poverty or gotten so intimately acquainted with the people of a rural area.
I was given his number by a friend in 2004 before a trip to Mexico to see an old girlfriend who was volunteering in Oaxaca City. We met in Mexico DF and partied. He showed me around on a couple of further trips I made there and I told him he always had a place to crash in my hometown New York. A year ago he called me from San Diego with the idea of making a docu about crossing the border. I thought maybe because I was a citizen I could actually follow a coyote through the desert without getting into any trouble. It turns out that it would be totally legal for me to enter the US through the desert but if I was with anyone without papers, I could wind up in jail for aiding and abetting human trafficking.
I also knew this had been done before and we didn't want to wind up with something sensationalistic or exploitative, so I encouraged Alex to come up with a better idea. I trusted him because I knew he was a good musician and an artistically minded guy with a strong education and feeling for socio-political issues. He did his homework (quite a bit) and six months later I found myself back in Oaxaca, but this time in the stunningly beautiful but remote, Sierra Mixteca, where Spanish is a second language to Mixteco and the people are quite a bit shorter and darker than Alex. Poorer too; neglected by the state and not eating vey much meat. Most importantly; kind, curious and very loving. I learned to love eating tortillas and beans with flowers and plants. Recently, In New York's current condition (12% unemployment) my freelance ass hasn't been eating much besides tortillas and beans (with the luxuries of cheese and avocado).
Alex had spent a few weeks having to convince everyone he's Mexican and then I showed up. Another guero, and indeed a gringo, speaking mediocre Spanish. But people accepted us and they wanted to talk. We worked in corn fields (I was born in NYC and I'd certainly never done that before) with families, drank with young people our age and got to know almost everybody. They all had family north. We met kids a little younger than us who spend as much time as possible in the cybercafes and blasted hip hop (American and Mexican) across the corn fields. I started to like chileno ranchero music.
Alex learned as much from my advice as from witnessing my mistakes. My 11 year old Sony VX-1000 was having trouble right before the trip but I thought it would be okay. Then I forgot to bring the battery charger. My roommate in New York Fedexed it to the nearest town (90 minutes away) for $100 and we shot our first interview with it to discover that my red CCD chip was gone. Interview #1 was useless and $100 and the effort of a long trip to Tlaxiaco were wasted. I felt like a fool but now Alex realized how important it was that I'd talked him into buying his own DV cam for secondary footage. I certainly didn't think mine was going to crap out entirely and thank god we did have this other camera.
Alex changed a lot of my preconceptions about Mexico and poverty in poor countries in general. I'm a liberal New Yorker, quick to blame all the world's ills on our government. Alex showed me that we had to get past simplistic ideas about the evils of imperialism and look at what's the matter with the Mexican state.


Going to small town Minnesota also showed me that not everyone outside New York is a racist hick. We met people of all opinions; racist, sympathetic and everything in between. The police chief doesn't want to ever have to enforce immigration laws because it's his duty to protect and serve all the people in his jurisdiction, not make them hide. Most people don't think Mexicans steal these jobs from citizens, they blame the large American corporations who rely on the labor since young people from Austin prefer to move to big cities after graduation.
In this town of less than 20,000 there is a Mexican community of two or three thousand, almost half from Magdalena and environs. Approximately half of them work in meatpacking. One can earn decent wages ($11-18 an hour) in a slaughterhouse and life is a lot cheaper and less stressful for immigrants than in big cities. However, it is a stagnant life in a pretty run down town and the meth trade from Minnesota and Chicago calls to both immigrant youth and Americans.
It almost seems like the Mexicans there have more of a community than anyone else. I know Central American immigrants in New York have their own soccer leagues and their own places for first baptism, wedding and quincenéra receptions, but I never thought I'd find myself at a huge wedding-dance in a high school ice hockey arena with 5,000 Mexicans who had come from all over the midwest; Iowa, Chicago, St. Louis. I even met a kid who grew up in New Jersey who wanted to know what the hell we were doing.
I taught Alex a lot about interviewing for camera. He didn't always take my advice, but the importance of having people repeat answers to questions for the camera, leaving them space between their answers and the next question and generally, keeping things at a comfortable pace so that subjects wouldn't be intimidated by this chilango, seeped in eventually. (I now think that people from Mexico City are the only people in the world more rude and tense than New Yorkers or Mumbaikers.) Sometimes I wanted to kill Alex because I'd be in the middle of shooting something he didn't think was important but I recognized as perfect b-roll and he'd be asking me tech questions. The more I taught him the more he started to question and even criticize my work. But by the end, he'd become a pretty good cameraman himself.
After 5 weeks of sharing a room and shooting every day we were tired, but we'd achieved a symbiosis that really worked. We knew what each other were thinking and we'd pushed each other to look at things in new ways. We both learned about local culture and Alex taught me about how things really work in Mexico. In Minnesota we went into a VFW hall, which Alex thought would be more an office for a civil association than social club, and we were first met with strange glares. But, after a few Coors lights the old vets really opened up to us. Just like drinking aguardiente in Mexico with the farmers.
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Austin-Magdalena:
Into the Bowels of Luxury

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.


Mexico

U.S



CCIS: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (Wayne Cornelius)
http://www.ccis-ucsd.org

Wayne has shaped the project from the beginning by believing in it, suggesting new angles, and putting us in contact with a vast array of other people who have supported the project. He can be thought as the detonator.

Con Mi Gente (Stephen Hickens)
http://www.conmigente.org

Stephen was instrumental in helping us enter Oaxaca, since he put us in contact with Susy and Randy Hinthorn.

COMI: Centro de Orientación del Migrante (Susy and Randy Hinthorn)
http://comi.giving.officelive.com/default.aspx

Susy and Randy are a very important link in this chain of events, because they introduced us to Father Fernando (below). They also helped us see the problem of migration from a humanitarian (and christian) perspective.

Don Bartletti (L.A Times)
http://www.kpbs.org/donbartletti

Mr. Bartletti has helped us avoid (as much as we could!) many rookie mistakes when trying to put together a journalistic piece, and also in this sense, has served as an ethical benchmark for the documentary.

Social Pastoral of Oaxaca (Fr. Fernando Cruz)
No website

Fr. Fernando picked us up in Oaxaca City in took us to San Mateo to meet his colleague, Father Gregorio (who is in charge of the parish in the beautiful pueblo of San Mateo Peñasco) and helped us convince him about the idea, which was by then still in exploratory phase.

San Mateo Peñasco's Parish (Fr. Gregorio)
No Website

Father Gregorio is a central piece of the project because he hosted the director and the cameraguy for almost a whole month in his parish and introduced them to local leaders, which softened the "landing" into the communities. He also fed them substantially.

ArtPower! (Rebecca Webb and Amy Thomas)
http://www.artpwr.com/

ArtPower!, through Rebecca and Amy, is involved in the project through an indispensable mix of guru-ness, networking and executive producing. They are also behind the idea of this blog.

UCSD Media Center (Adriene Hughes + Bill Campagna)
http://mediacenter.ucsd.edu

The UCSD Media Center has provided technical support and facilities related to the process of transferring the DV to a hard-drive and editing. This, of course, is also relevant to the extent that the producers' wallets have stopped bleeding, albeit only temporarily.