BRATTLEBORO-Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) will screen the documentary Borderland: The Line Within at Brattleboro's Latchis Theatre on Sunday, Oct 26. The film will be followed by a discussion with filmmakers Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís.
As explained in a WWAC press release, the 110-minute film is described by The New York Times as taking "a surprisingly multidisciplinary approach [to the border crisis] fueled by both personal history and government data."
In their promotional materials, the filmmakers posit that "the United States border is everywhere: It is not just a geographical line, but rather a vast border-industrial complex entrenched in every corner of the country. It is a massive surveillance, militarized and carceral apparatus, built to capture, imprison and deport millions. It lies within every undocumented immigrant family with the threat that at any moment they can be captured, incarcerated, deported, and their lives destroyed."
The film "not only exposes the profitable business of immigration and its human cost, but weaves together the stories of immigrant heroines and heroes resisting and showing a way forward" as they build a movement to resist these trends.
As described by the filmmakers, "the narrative thread that weaves Borderland together is a group of Ph.D. digital humanists, immigrants all."
In their work at Columbia University's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research in New York City, the scholars are "researching, scraping the web, and creatively visualizing the inner workings of the border-industrial complex."
With that information, "the film examines who's involved, the flow of funds, locations of the many ICE detention centers that dot the country, far from the border itself." Moreover, it looks at how fear of immigrants, characterized as the "other," is used as a gateway to autocratic governance while revealing "the exponential growth of the Customs and Border Protection's budget: $25 billion in taxpayers' dollars in 2024."
The Commons recently spoke with Yates (director) and de Onís (producer), whose connection to WWAC is through its chair, Merrill Sovner, a freelance researcher and consultant focused on democratization, international aid, and nonprofit program development and evaluation.
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Annie Landenberger: The border-industrial complex: how deeply rooted is this?
Pamela Yates: [This] has been happening across the political spectrum, starting when Clinton was president. That's when we're really beginning to see this new idea about the border policy and the amounts of money growing exponentially each year to fund the border-industrial complex - to capture, incarcerate, deport, and separate families. You know, really huge amounts of money - billions of dollars - being spent and gained on the backs of the suffering of immigrants.
That's one of the things that distinguishes the film: We say, "It's a system: Look at it. Both Democrats and Republicans support it, and we have to change [it]."
A.L.: So tell me about this line in your press materials: "The film's protagonists, all immigrants themselves, are quietly building strength." What does that look like?
P.Y.: Well, that means that people are developing leadership, that they're knowing their rights, that they're networking within their communities, that they're creating mutual support networks.
The thing about this film is that it's predictive. We didn't realize it while we were making it. What we said was going to happen is happening right now, tenfold.
Paco de Onís: We'd hoped it would have been a preventive film, but now, you know, this border-industrial complex has just tripled its budget with Trump.
A.L.: So you'd hoped it'd have been an eye-opener, a wake-up call to spark some preemptive striking against it?
P.O.: And so that we could [urge viewers to contact] your local congressperson, your state representatives, to just put pressure on politicians. So many sectors of our society, especially in the political realm and economic realm, are benefiting from this really cruel border-industrial complex.
P.Y.: We'd hoped in the last election that being aware of what immigration policies both Democrats and Republicans have embraced would open up a third way for us to deal with immigration.
[Such] policies would welcome immigrants into the United States, and that rather than spending that money on keeping people out and violent means to do so, it would be spent more on services and welcoming and education - the things that people who come to the United States really need when they get here. They are often fleeing violent regimes or climate change or very scary situations in their home country.
So many communities would prefer that approach to immigration.
That's what we also mean when we say "building strength." I mean, when you see ICE going into communities these days and you see the social media of many people who have prevented captures and deportations from their communities just by people power, that makes you realize that they're more of us than there are of them.
We always tell hero stories about our ancestors, the immigrants who came here and provided a life for our great-grandparents and parents and us. The immigrants who are here today and those coming, they're the same - exactly the same. We're going to be telling hero stories about them, too. So why are they being vilified and used to really dismantle our democracy?
A.L.: That's the question. How did you connect with the researchers at Columbia?
P.Y.: I found them on the internet. I was looking for people in the United States who were coming up with really creative and innovative ways of helping immigrants and going against the tide in the first Trump administration when we found this project.
Because we live in New York and they were at Columbia, we just wrote to them, and they invited us up for a lunch. The one-hour lunch turned into a five-hour afternoon: We really hit it off, and we decided to work together.
A.L.: What was the catalyst for the film?
P.Y.: We'd been working in Central America for many years. Our [previous] film was about the Ríos Montt genocide trial in Guatemala. The film was in 2017; the trial was in 2013. And there were a lot of Central American refugees coming over the border. The majority were Guatemalan, [most of whom] were indigenous.
I thought, if you're going to make films internationally, it's really important to critique your own country, too. And that was when we started to develop the idea of telling this story in our country at this time, at the beginning of the first Trump administration.
A.L.: What kinds of responses have you had? Has Borderland been seen by people in power who can influence? Has it been a tool for action?
P.O.: People are startled by both the agency of the protagonists in the film and the revelation of the extent of the border-industrial complex and how it really penetrates into every corner of this country. Virtually every congressional district is somehow benefiting from it.
Even in Vermont, I'll bet, if there's a detention center, somebody's doing the laundry for it. Somebody's providing the meals, right? I mean, it creates this thing where people who are not bad people - they're just working people - have jobs that are connected to that complex.
It's a little bit like the military-industrial complex, right? It just puts its tentacles out all over the place. So that's why it's so hard to dismantle, too, because people's livelihood has come to depend on it.
P.Y.: The film has been used in all the cities we went to, and cities we can't go, to help build the local movements. We offer the film [through Eventive, a website that connects filmmakers with audiences] as a fundraiser to help strengthen and raise funds for the local work.
But the unforeseen [outcome] was that all these groups got connected through the film.
In March, we did a national immigration solidarity rally online with the leadership in all the cities where we had shown the film to plot a way forward. So things like that are happening.
I believe that courage is contagious. And when you see courageous people in a film, you want to be that way, too. Those are things we can't really measure. Those have no metrics.
A.L.: So we're talking about immigrants as a whole, yes? The entire cohort?
P.O.: Well, the film focuses on protagonists from Mexico and Central America.
The people who put together the information on the border-industrial complex are also immigrants, but they're from Pakistan, Kashmir, and the Dominican Republic.
When you see the film, I mean, you just extrapolate. If you are an immigrant from Asia or South Asia or [other places not represented in the film], I think you would recognize yourself there. So in that sense, yes, it applies to all because it's the immigration policy. The border-industrial complex isn't just focused on Latinos.
A.L.: What I don't understand is that by vilifying immigrants and sending them home, we're just ripping apart the backbone of our workforce, right? Why would that be? Why would anybody - including the billionaires - benefit from that? Why would Trump benefit from sending away the people who do the farm work, who do the hotel work? I don't understand the impulse.
P.O.: Yeah, you're absolutely right about the workforce. The Texas Home Builders Association has asked Trump to make an exception for them; the apple growers of Washington state have asked, too.
So Trump being Trump and being sort of the Mafia don that he is, he'll do the favors for the ones that come and ask him for something, but he will ask something from them, too, I'm sure. That's what's going on: The big agriculture concerns - they're figuring that they can just deal directly with Trump on a one-by-one basis.
P.Y.: I think we have to look past immigration, which is being used as this tool to dismantle democracy. And a lot of it, I think, is this performative cruelty that we see night after night on the television.
It's really a political stance using immigration. So, no, I don't think they want to deport millions and millions of workers in America. And there'll be all kinds of walkbacks for different industries to be able to allow workers to stay here, because you're so right. We do need them, right? The dairy farms in Vermont and New York need them. All the agriculture in the Central Valley in California needs them.
P.O.: Actually, if you go by the numbers, they're deporting [fewer] people than the Biden administration. [Fewer] people than Obama. But it's a performance. I mean, this is a government that's made up of right-wing social-media influencers. They're all about performance. They have professional camera crews going out on ICE raids with them.
And you know the way social media selects who gets to see what? Your algorithm probably doesn't show it to you as much as it does to the MAGA people who love this stuff. For them, it's like a reality TV show 24 hours a day.
And I think for the billionaires, [it's wanting] the ability to just take over the government and get rid of all regulations. Get rid of everything that the billionaires don't want. I don't think they give a hoot about immigration. All they give a hoot about is being able to do unfettered, aggressive capitalism.
I think that's the ultimate goal here. That's why all the tech billionaires have crowded around Trump.
A.L.: Kissing the ring.
P.Y.: We're also now working on the sequel to this film, Borderland Underground.
P.O.: One thing we noticed on our 50-city tour with [Borderland] was that all the Q&As became sort of spontaneous testimonials - stories of their parents who are undocumented.
In our body of work, in our trajectory, we've done a lot of films about truth commissions - you know, genocide trials, all kinds of truth-seeking efforts.
Borderland Underground is going to be about taking this brain trust that we put together of people we worked with in past films, many of whom are from Latin America, where they've done a lot of work with truth commissions. And we're forming a networked People's Truth Commission here in the United States to gather testimonies of everything that's going on and create an archive.
A.L.: One last question. In the film, researcher and digital humanist Alex Hill asked, "What if we had known about the similar complex that Nazi Germany was creating, that Hitler was creating?" Do you think that we're kind of catching this in time, that we won't go there?
P.O.: I think we've already gone there. It's just whether we can find a way to stop it - that's the big question. The detention centers have been built, and they're being filled. They're all privately owned, so they need to fill every bed every night. So they just keep detaining more and more and more people.
So it's happening. It's here.
A.L.: So the hope - I'm always looking for hope - is in the building of strength?
P.O.: Yes. We're always looking for hope, too.
P.Y.: We're always looking for hope. And I would say that in all our films - even in the darkest moment - there are always people finding a way forward.
Those are the protagonists of our films.
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The film screening and discussion with Borderland: The Line Within's filmmakers, Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís, takes place Sunday, Oct. 26, 5 to 7 p.m. at the Latchis Theatre, 50 Main St., Brattleboro. Admission is by donation ($10 suggested, though one will be turned away for lack of funds). To reserve, visit bit.ly/47gqtCh. Tickets will also be available at the door.
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Editor's note: Stories presented as interviews in this format are edited for clarity, readability, and space. Words not spoken by interview subjects appear in brackets.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.