The American (La Americana)
D: Nicholas BruckmanDocumentary Feature Competition, U.S.
Maria del Carmen Rojas is a Bolivian woman working illegally in New York City. After a bus accident left her young daughter in a wheelchair, Rojas – knowing that she would never make enough money in her home country to pay all the medical bills – made the long journey to a seedy motel in Tijuana, Mexico, and then, stowed inside a car seat, crossed the border into California to begin her new life as a public enemy of the state, a criminal mastermind in the eyes of the U.S. government, though one barely scraping by vacuuming floors and washing dogs in Madison Avenue boutiques and for various Upper East Side swells. Rojas' story is probably not much different from those of the other 12 million or so men and women currently living illegally in the U.S., and La Americana director Bruckman is smart to set his heroine's story against the backdrop of the intractable political debate over immigration raging in the halls of Congress and on 24-hour cable-news shows, giving his film a sense of weight and historical importance. When you've sacrificed everything for a shot at the American dream, all politics are truly personal. – Josh Rosenblatt
Friday, April 18, 9pm, Metropolitan
