synopsis in progress
In three weeks, roughly three hundred Mexican nationals who had been living in illegally in Florida have arrived in Windsor and claimed refugee status. The reasons for this unprecedented exodus remains murky, but reports suggest they are arriving on the advice of consulting companies and community groups in Florida. These groups have been actively telling illegal Hispanics living in Florida that Canada will accept them as refugees, and while their case is being processed, give them shelter, welfare, health care and free legal counsel. Those who have decided to come to Canada, some of whom have been conned into paying 400 dollars to have basic refugee form filled out, have discovered just what they were promised. Already the city of Windsor has spent nearly 300 000 dollars housing, feeding and processing those who have arrived. And, a story in the St Petersburg Times, Tampa Bay’s largest daily, reports that those who have come to Windsor, are calling their friends and family to say they too should come to Canada, because our country is everything they thought it would be. In less then a month, rumors and crooked immigration consultants have uprooted families almost a continent away and brought a small city’s social services to its knees.
So far, the media has told this story from the perspective of our politicians and policy makers but failed to tell the human realties of the story. We know what the mayor of Windsor and a handful of federal immigration officials think, but not one broadcaster has chosen to express the emotions and struggles of the mothers and fathers who have brought their children to yet another country on nothing more then faint hope of a better life. Their story must be told so that they can become real. Because, until that happens they are numbers, passing anecdotes, and another pair of the frozen eyes we see in our morning newspaper.
Our approach to this film is to answer the question: What happens when three hundred refugees show up in a town like Windsor? We want to know what this means for Windsor and for the refugees. We know what happens to the social system but we do not know what happens to these families, the children, the parents, their education, and their way of life. The film will show audiences the faces of these families who are struggling to search out a home somewhere in North America.
The process will be a fusion of traditional journalism and documentary filmmaking. We will uncover the story as we go along and will be led by the families we meet who wish to share their stories. The focus of the film will be the daily lives of the refugees but we will also be looking to meet with lawyers, social workers and others who are involved in the story. In turn we will have a richly textured and personalized story that will give us a lens into the larger political narrative of Canadian immigration and refugee issue. |