Through the lens of immigrants
Oscar Guerra is telling me he studied journalism en route to getting his doctorate in mass communication from the University of North Carolina, but insists “I don’t consider myself a journalist.”
I correct him: “No, you’re a journalist.”
We’re on the phone, so he can’t see me smile. Nor can I surmise his reaction.
He lets the comment pass. But it’s impossible to watch his documentaries and not recognize that he frames his scenes through the filter of a journalist.
It was apparent in his “Love, Life & the Virus,” which aired on PBS in August and documented the story of the immigrant Stamford mom who gave birth while fighting COVID and the teacher who took in the newborn while she recovered.
He was already working on a film at the time. But sometimes, as every journalist knows, another story can get in the way.
Guerra, who teaches film at the University of Connecticut’s Stamford campus, will unspool the project he put on pause Wednesday in a virtual screening that’s free and open to the public. Following the 28-minute film, he will participate in a panel discussion with some of the film’s subjects, including Sister Norma Seni Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the River Grande Valley, who is on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2020.
Guerra’s approaches distinguish “Strength: Documenting the Asylum Seeker” from other movies about families crossing the border into the United States. He interviews people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador just hours after their arrival, and then retraces their tortured journeys in animated sequences.
It was an invention of necessity, but the effect adds layers of dimension in more ways than one. For too many Americans, the people crossing into the “promised land” are caricatures. We meet Vivian on her first day in America, and can’t help but be momentarily distracted by the rumble in her young son’s throat as he coughs into the autumn Texas air. That cough makes the terror feel almost tactile as bold crimson, amber and coal drawings depict her description in Spanish of trying to shield him during their trek through chilling nighttime rains as his fever spiked.
If Guerra had his way, he would not have had to improvise and collaborate with inventive artist Andy Warner (who has been called a comics journalist). But those fighting to stay alive to make it to the other side aren’t thinking about taking selfies.
“I wanted to paint a profile of why they decide to come here. What are the obstacles, what are the dreams? What does it mean to chase and pursue the American dream nowadays?”
One of the qualities he cherishes about the form is that “you start with one thing and then the idea takes you somewhere else.”
I again draw a bridge, noting that the best journalists also resist forcing a story in the direction it might be expected to follow.
“What you find is even better than what you initially (pursued),” he says, finishing the thought.
He reveals his inner reporter again when he reflects on working with sources on the border: “As you know, access, sometimes, is the most difficult thing.”
It enabled him to capture a mother detailing a two-day span without food for her three children; another who flees with one child, leaving another behind; and a young father who migrates with his daughter after his father and brother were killed by gangs for falling behind on rent payments.
They aren’t so much trying to follow dreams as escape nightmares.
Hearing “there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my kids” carried deeper resonance for Guerra because he and his wife, Susan, had just become parents.
He was also reminded that even with the foundation of two degrees from Tecnologico de Monterrey University in Mexico City, he faced challenges at UNC six years ago. How much worse, he tries to imagine, would such anxiety possibly be for a young child new to a country?
Guerra tells his students to make sure they are passionate about the stories they want to tell, for the journey from concept to completed film is long. For him, “migrants adjusting to their life here in the States” remains fasci
nating.
He came to Stamford just a little more than a year ago to take the UConn gig as assistant professor of film and video. The pandemic demanded more improv, to “build the plane while flying in it,” and serves as a reminder to his students that they be must be ready for unexpected working conditions.
His PBS project dovetailed with his wife’s duties as a nurse at Stamford Hospital during the early peak of the coronavirus. She would come home from work and declare “I need to shower and disinfect everything” before holding their 2-year-old.
Still, the woman he proudly dubs “the best nurse ever,” was determined that “I have to be there.”
Guerra is hopeful that isolation can prove fruitful to creativity, to inspire something that has not been done before.
I ask if he has remained in touch with any of the people he interviewed during their first hours on American soil. It inspires him to start thinking aloud about the possibilities of revisiting families a few years apart to learn their fates, a la the famed “Up” series that has documented 14 British lives every seven years since they were school children in 1964.
You can sense a film festival forming in Guerra’s imagination as he considers such potential. A fantasy project may be his purest: to use drones (which he deftly utilizes in “Strength”) to track the full trek of someone seeking asylum.
In that spirit, his next project will take an experimental approach to eliminate the need for animation, to essentially turn his subjects into the cameras. He has provided families along the Texas border with smartphones (“they can’t be too flashy so they don’t get mugged”) and Go-Pro cameras.
“Having the actual footage when something is happening, that’s priceless. They become the producers of their own stories.”
He’s turning them into filmmakers ... and/or journalists. The job title isn’t the part that matters. As Guerra likes to remind his students, “Story is the most important thing.”