Straight answers to FAQ about people and choices in the film Notes for techies Shot in regular 16mm, mostly on 7274 color negative Kodak stock, with an Arriflex SR-1, Zeiss T2 10-100. Audio was double system sound using Fostex PD-4 DAT machine utilizing SMPTE time code with time code slate for synching. Almost all sound was boomed, using Schoeps mics. Shooting was 98% hand held & available light. Comtex system for monitoring. 85 hours of film, approximately 100 hours of DAT audio. Film transferred to Beta SP, dailies syncing done in-house with SoftSplice audio editing. Cut on a FilmComposer. Broadcast Master is transfer from DuArt 35mm blow-up interpositive. Only Macs were used to make the film and the web site. Straight answers to FAQ about people and choices in the film
Gladys doesn't have an attorney. Why not? How common is this? Gladys' situation is not at all uncommon, but it's not quite so clear as it looks. In fact, she did have legal help from the asylum experts at American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Newark preparing her case. They continued to advise her after her case was referred. When we were filming, a general informal estimate around the Asylum office was that at least 80% of the applicants came in for interviews without an attorney, and it seemed that most of them really didn't have any representative. A fair number of people did get some kind of "help" with their application forms -- this ranged all the way from a lawyer preparing the case but just not coming to the interview to paralegal help and to community NGO assistance, or going further afield, to for-profit travel agents and notarios even all the way to the mostly hearsay-oriented advice of friends and family. Given the precision and, in practical terms, the narrowness of asylum law, some of this help -- particularly from the unscrupulous and the uninformed -- was far more dangerous than helpful. The reasons many asylum seekers don't have attorneys are as varied as anything else about this process, but often the reasons can be boiled down to the cost. Representing asylum clients is not a lucrative branch of the legal profession, but even modest attorney's fees can be prohibitive for someone living here and unable to work. Have you shown the film to the applicants in the movie? How did they react? We have a sort of filmmaker's creed that we always show the film to the people who are in it first. For Well-Founded Fear, that meant fine cut screenings (of a cut actually almost 45 minutes longer than the one broadcast on POV) in a big public theater last May. Applicants, attorneys, advocates and their associates watched it on one night, and people in the asylum offices where we shot saw it on another day. The reactions were, of course, pretty varied. It's indescribably strange to see yourself in a real movie on screen in a big dark theater, even if it is only a documentary. Beyond the "home movie" effect, though, it's fair to say there were surprises all around. The feedback went on and on and hasn't stopped until this day. In a very generalized summary, the attorneys were divided between those who felt we had captured a "real" picture of the process, even though it was a fairly even-handed portrait, and those who called the film a whitewash because they felt the INS looked so reasonable compared to the group of intractable creeps and bullies they know them to be. Applicants had the most varied reactions of any group, likely because they were only at one asylum interview, on one particular day, and the outcome made such a huge difference to their lives, while the officers and even the attorneys do this over and over. On the whole, they seemed fairly pleased with their own appearances in the film. And several said they wished they had been able to see a film like this before their asylum interview -- that they really learned a lot! The asylum office audience was pretty much divided into three parts -- the ones who felt betrayed that we did show some of warts in the system (oddly, hardly any of those people were in the film); another third who watched the show just like any general audience and loved it when applicants were granted and cried when they were referred, and generally acted like they did not wake up every morning and go to work at the asylum office; and then about a third more who were just furious with us for not managing to include them in the film - "you left me on the cutting room floor!" What has been the reaction of INS administration to the film? We screened the final cut of the show for INS Commissioner Doris Meissner down at headquarters in Washington, D.C. last October. It was the first opportunity she had to see any of the film, and at that time no one but the actual participants had seen the any of the film. Several other high-level administrators watched it at the same time. We are not sure what each of them really thought, but after the lights came up, Commissioner Meissner graciously joined us in front of the audience and said something like this, 'Well, thank you, Michael and Shari. It's hard to watch, I'll admit. But I'm really very glad that this film was made." We understand that the film did raise discussion on a lot of issues within the Asylum administration. Possibly the biggest problem people jumped on was translation. We hope that the film and its ancillary pieces will be useful to the INS long after the broadcast. Why did Cristian wait seven years to pursue political asylum? Actually, he didn't choose to wait seven years -- that's how long it took for his interview to be scheduled after he filed his application papers. His case was a classic one of an asylum seeker with a strong claim caught in the backlog (see "Why does it take so long for some asylum cases to be heard?" in About Asylum), and probably would have sounded very different to an officer in the first year it was filed. How aware was the INS of translation discrepancies before the film? We don't know the exact answer to that. Our own experience making more than 40 films overseas would lead us to believe that anyone who has to work in another language through a translator gives the matter a great deal of thought. But we can tell you that there has been much surprise and dismay expressed among the INS viewers of the film so far, as well as a certain optimism that translation was an area of the process where improvement could surely be made. How did you get access to the INS? The short answer to this most frequently asked question is simply, "We asked the INS Commissioner for permission." The fact that no one had ever been allowed access before meant that the odds against us getting in were huge, but in fact, the actual permission process was not the hardest part of access at all. Our deal with the INS eventually was very clean and simple: we were allowed to be on INS premises where the asylum process took place to film, and everyone who appeared in the final film must have indicated their agreement by signing a full release. So the hardest part of the access came later -- winning people over one by one to help us make the film, by agreeing to be in it. There's a lot more about this in the link from ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS if you'd like to know more. Did you try to film any of the detention process/facilities? We planned to do that and even got all the research and introductions done to begin shooting, when it just became impossible for us to continue. We were extremely distressed, especially as many of the Asylum Officers we already knew fairly well were doing Credible Fear hearings in the same detention center where we planned to shoot. Later on, in the edit, we realized that the absence of a detention story may have been a creative blessing in disguise, because it helped us to stay and keep the film right inside the offices where the affirmative process took place, giving you a real experience of that system which is both asylum at its best and yet still so terribly fragile. Understanding how the affirmative system works and doesn't is useful too, because it allows a good comparison to the new speeded-up version of the process that takes place in a jail, with all the additional stresses and constraints of that context. We feel that the comparison is understandably troubling. How did you choose which stories to put in the film? We knew all along that asylum is fantastically interesting and important to understand, one of those subjects that gets into your head and stays fascinating forever. But we also knew from the beginning that we had to make a film about this terribly complicated and rule-bound and boring-looking process that is the real-life mirror of a very abstract subject, and make that all work and be interesting to a general audience who mostly didn't even know it existed! During the year of production, we shot 50 asylum cases, trying to make sure we had a good representative range in our footage (that's a total of 85 hours of film). We never had any control over what would happen -- cases got assigned to Asylum Officers randomly by computer once the applicant arrived at the office, so we just had to roll with the punches. Fortunately, we never wanted to do just a statistical portrait. We were really aiming more for a translation of the essence, knowing that the specifics always change. Each case we filmed was in fact pretty fascinating to watch on it's own back in the editing room, once you understood the basics about asylum. But they didn't always work or even make much sense otherwise. Cutting and shaping it all down to a two hour program that might get people interested enough to want to learn more was incredibly hard, particularly because many of the best and juiciest cases just didn't work out -- sometimes they added too many additional characters, sometimes they were just too complicated and would have had to be a whole movie of their own. In the end, the choice of which stories to use in the film started way back with who agreed to be filmed, and then went on through this long process of trying to shape our understanding into a watchable film. We take full responsibility for the final product, but in documentaries, you don't write a script. What are some compelling stories that didn't make it into the movie? There are so many! Even though the film introduces the audience to lots more people than the normal documentary these days, we still have 40 cases left over. Some wonderful stories that didn't work in the film are serialized here on the website in STAY TUNED and featured in YOUR DECISION. Asylum law is obviously quite complicated. Why didn't you provide more statistics/guidelines to help the viewer understand the process? We wanted people to see this film. We think it's very important for Americans to understand and appreciate our national commitment to asylum. That's the first goal -- to help people know about it, and become interested in it. So we wanted to make a feature documentary that felt a lot like a real movie, that let the audience get into an experience and really be there, judging things for themselves until the lights came up. Obviously, the statistics and background add a lot, and the more you know, the more interesting the film is to watch. But every time we tried adding more facts and figures, either as text on screen or as narration, it began to feel less like a movie and more like an educational film, and unfortunately, "educational" films have a really hard time crossing over into a wide general audience these days. We hope that additional resources like this website, the facilitator's guides, the media tool kit and discussion materials that accompany the film and the broadcast will help fill the gaps and encourage you to find out more. Did you film any discrimination cases that were based on sexual orientation? We filmed one interesting case, a very well-known guy from Brazil, where sexual orientation and celebrity both contributed to a claim of persecution on account of membership in a particular social group. They certainly came through the offices while we were there, and are considered part of larger category often called "gender" cases, that also includes spousal abuse, rape and FGM (female genital mutilation). Did you film any rape cases? We did. Rape comes up as a part of a fair number of asylum claims, and tends to be a particularly troubling, hot button issue around the Asylum Office, as you'll see in Urmila's STAY TUNED story. What happens to Jamal? Jamal, the young Sudanese man whose case is included in the POV cut of Well-Founded Fear, returned to the Asylum Office two weeks after his interview to find that he was granted asylum. How did people react to being in front of the camera? Different people always react differently, and it's really hard to predict who'll enjoy being in a documentary and who will just detest it. It gets to be boring or annoying pretty quickly, which can be relaxing too. In the Asylum office, especially during interviews, the real life events are so much more important than the camera that people often told us they just forgot about it altogether. However they felt about the camera, though, we are really grateful to everybody who allowed us to film, and to those who helped us understand the place and how it worked, even when they didn't want to be filmed. Did making this movie influence the outcome of any of the cases filmed? Of course it's impossible to know for sure, but it's a pretty safe bet that it may have. Knowing that the arrival of a camera usually does change things for a while, we spent about nine months hanging around the Asylum Office, just getting to know people and explain what we wanted to do, observing the daily routine and sitting in on cases before we ever started filming. This research experience gave us a good baseline idea of what life was like before cameras, so that we could measure what we were getting on film against something more neutral. When we started shooting, we noticed that Officers were taking almost two hours to complete cases that wouldn't have run longer than 45 minutes the week before, so we knew they were being extra careful. A good documentary crew gets to be very boring very fast, and we kept on filming for 12 months. That unnatural precision -- and the two-hour interviews -- didn't last too long, but it's possible that a couple of cases were given special care because of the camera. What was the problem Gerald was struggling with during Farida's case? Political asylum rests on the very specific idea that a person is, was, or will be targeted for persecution on account of one of the five protected grounds -- race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. An asylum seeker has to make the case that she is special, and has been singled out. That is hardest in a context of civil war or violent anarchy, where everything is chaos all around and terrible things are essentially happening to everybody, for all kinds of reasons, sometimes but not necessarily always including the reasons of targeted persecution on account of one of the five grounds. Gerald does articulate this at the end of the film, but it's a little hard to comprehend at first -- the danger is just as real and just as terrifying, whether they know who you are or not -- so it doesn't automatically make sense. Still, that's what asylum is: a rather narrow avenue of relief for very particular circumstances. It certainly doesn't cover everything. And yet, it's not hard to understand why frightened people, scared enough to leave home and flee for their lives, might expect it to do just that. Why didn't you address asylum for refugees from Cuba? The short answer is that we didn't film any. And we never even heard of a Cuban case going through the Asylum Office while we were shooting. Cubans have enjoyed a special circumstance in terms of asylum for many years now. Where does the film take place? There are only eight Asylum offices in the whole country. Since we are based in New York City, we were lucky to be able to film in two of those - New York and Newark. The others are in Arlington, VA; Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Foreign language translation is, to an extent, sometimes subjective. How did you go about coming up with definitive translations for the subtitles? Back translation is definitely one place the filmmaker has an advantage over real life. We wanted to be scrupulous about perfect subtitles, since so much rides on translation and what is actually said in these situations. In the total body of footage, we have material in 26 different languages -- all of it translated several times in the months after filming. For every subtitle in the film, at least three different translators have gone over the footage to do literal translations, then move those into more standard English. The subtitles themselves are written from those perfected transcripts, using an old BBC formula that makes them optimally readable. This seems like an amazingly difficult job. Don't the officers burn out fast? "It's a human system, and no two are the same", says Larry. Nobody is arguing that it's not a tremendously difficult job -- it's easy to imagine oneself burning out after just a few days. We felt it as a film crew several times over the months we spent in the offices. The actual job affects people differently, of course. They are trained to deal with the emotional stress and some manage to find approaches that work for them better than others. We certainly never had anyone confess to us that they knew they were burned out, but on the other hand, the subject does come up in various forms pretty often. Officers seem to try to support each other a lot, especially since almost nobody outside their offices really can be much help -- their friends and families for the most part don't even understand what they do, and the horrors of the rest of the world are blissfully outside daily awareness for most of us. The real burn-out question is probably, "How many people are burnt out and don't know it?" And then the corollary, "What does that do to the asylum process?" How to buy a copy of the film Visit the Epidavros Project Web site for purchasing information. |
