Canadians humanize immigrant experience in ‘Little America’
It’s called “Little America,” but it has some big Canadian connections.
The new Apple TV Plus anthology series, based on true stories of immigrants in the U.S., has two Canadian directors on two different episodes, one of which was also shot in Montreal.
Oscar-nominated Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta helmed the first episode, “The Manager,” about a young spelling bee champion who runs his family’s Utah motel when his parents are deported back to India.
And Toronto filmmaker Stephen Dunn directed the eighth episode, “The Son,” about a gay man who flees his disapproving family in Syria and bides his time in Jordan while awaiting asylum in the United States.
“It’s a sensitive series,” Mehta said in a recent phone interview from Madrid, where she’s editing her upcoming film “Funny Boy,” based on a book by Shyam Selvadurai.
“As an immigrant to Canada — and now I’m a Canadian citizen — I’m really tired of the ‘poor immigrants who come in’ story: stories of strife, the stories of how to get over the strife. There seem to be just two stories for immigrants, there’s no human face to them. So suddenly the idea of getting a human face was really interesting.”
“Little America” is inspired by real stories featured in Epic magazine.
“These are often narratives that are never the centre of the story, characters that are never usually the protagonist in Hollywood filmmaking,” said Dunn, who was born in St. John’s, N.L., and wrote and directed 2015’s “Closet Monster,” which won the Best Canadian Feature award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“And what I loved is there’s such diversity and such a celebration of culture in this show.”
Mehta said she was drawn to the team behind the series and “fell in love” with “The Manager” script by playwright Rajiv Joseph, who was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.”
She spoke by phone with the real-life protagonist who inspired the episode, Kunal Sah, as well as his parents, and shot the episode in a New Jersey motel run by a Pakistani-American family.
Mehta feels it’s an important series at a time of political tensions over U.S. immigration policies.
“More than any other time I think that the series would be relevant, because it’s humanistic,” said Mehta, who grew up in New Delhi and wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Water.”
“Toni Morrison said that all art is political and she’s absolutely right on. Because there is a very solid, political, not inyour-face kind of thing about the series, but definitely the foundation is political.”
U.S. immigration policies had a direct impact on production of “The Son” episode, which is written by Dunn and Amrou Al-Kadhi.
They had to move production to Montreal with a mostly Canadian crew because of a travel ban that restricted actor Adam Ali — a Libyan-born, U.K. citizen — from shooting in the U.S. Ali was also recently refused entry in the U.S. for the series premiere in L.A.