Houston filmmakers document local immigrants’ lives
‘Seeds of All Things,’ with showings Sunday and Friday, immerses viewers into lives of families seeking care at southwest clinic
Yan Digilov isn’t wearing a T-shirt that says “Southwest Houston 4 Life,” but he might as well be.
The 29-year-old documentary film producer, a Russian Jewish refugee who came to the U.S. with his parents as a child, grew up in the area and remains close by, in a small apartment not far from the West Loop. More important, all of his work reflects the sprawling area’s history as a first stop and jumping-off point for Houston’s many immigrant communities.
His third and latest film with director Yehuda Sharim, the son of Iranian Jewish refugees whom he met while studying at Rice University, is “Seeds of All Things,” a documentary set at southwest Houston’s Hope Clinic, where viewers are thrown into the lives of immigrant families such as the Dayans from Iran and the alMoslehs from Syria as they seek medical care. “Seeds of All Things” has two upcoming screenings: on Sunday at Asia Society Texas and Friday at Rice Media Center.
“I still haven’t moved more than a couple of miles down the road,” Digilov says of his affinity for the neighborhood. “I’ve been in Houston my whole life, went to school here, couldn’t leave here and got swept up in realizing that a lot of my friends also came as refugees.”
“Seeds of All Things” follows on the heels of the 2016 production “We Are in It,” a chronicle of five immigrants from Iraq, Mexico, Togo, Burma and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as they navigate their new lives in Houston, and this year’s “Lessons in Seeing,” which follows an elderly Ethiopian immigrant and math teacher, Sibhatleab, who finds cultural sustenance at a southwest Houston market where immigrants gather.
The films are just one arm of Digilov and Sharim’s nonprofit Firestarter, an umbrella organization that conducts research on immigrant communities — one article, “Refugee Realities: Between National Challenges and Local Responsibilities in Houston, TX,” was published through the Kinder Institute for Urban Research — and, through Houstoninmotion.org, provides a digital bulletin board of sorts for immigrants and refugees searching for services in Houston.
“As everything that has happened over the last couple of years, we have found such strength through coming together and real meaningful creative endeavors,” Digilov says. “The films have been primarily an education tool for an Iraqi refugee to understand that an undocumented migrant from Mexico is not in a different position.
“Southwest Houston is massive swath of the city, and you have all these tiny pockets, and the divide-and-conquer strategy isn’t helping anybody,” he continues. “We’ve been able to come together for a lot of different communities, and it was only through film and art that we were able to see for ourselves and go, ‘Of course, political definitions aren’t really the ones that define us’ and could we envision a better way.”
Finding Hope
Digilov said he and Sharim, a professor of Jewish studies at Rice who has recently relocated to California to teach film at UC Merced, were attracted to making a documentary set at the Hope Clinic for a variety of reasons.
“A health clinic isn’t just about giving you shots,” Digilov says. “You see people meeting in the health clinic who haven’t seen each other in years and sitting in that waiting room, sharing that love you don’t see in the grocery store or at CVS. ... By definition, you’re sitting in those chairs waiting and you’re vulnerable.”
It took some time, though, to persuade the clinic to let them film, and more time for patients to become comfortable with the idea.
“It takes months and months of sitting in those hallways filming nothing,” he says. “The first couple of weeks we’re there not even filming. It’s about building relationships, building rapport and really being invited into the community space.
“Not everyone is comfortable letting a strange man and a camera follow them around,” Digilov says, noting that wouldbe participants sometimes see a camera as a weapon.
Also, Digilov and Sharim chose not to narrate the film, instead letting those being filmed tell their story.
“It’s very easy to filter things. It’s very easy to curate things. It’s very easy to paint a picture of the resilient refugee, the happy immigrant or of a painful journey and tragic beginnings. That’s not the ethical choice,” Digilov says. “In all of our work, it’s not about painting a picture that responds to some notions that we have. We let people speak.”
America’s future?
It’s often said that polyglot Houston, perhaps the most diverse big city in the U.S., is what future America looks like. Digilov thinks that may be true, but not just in the tourist-brochure sense in which it is often invoked.
“If the divestment in public institutions is the future of America, then yeah. Communities of color being isolated in silos and not having access to resources, then yeah,” says Digilov, who maintains that many of the measures that helped him and his family integrate in the ’90s no longer exist. “And, for refugees, if it means rapid employment at the cost of English-language acquisition, long-term upward mobility opportunities and education, then yeah, perpetual lowwage employment is the future of America.”
So Digilov and Sharim will continue to write and make films about the immigrant and refugee experience in Houston; “Seeds” actually is the first of three planned films that involve the Dayan family. He sees himself in refugees like them.
Digilov says, “That’s a big part for me (and) for Yehuda is to connect with our history as Jewish Americans who are nothing other than refugees.”