By Áine O’Brien
‘How Democracy Works Now’ reads more like arid political science than a riveting 12-part documentary series on the US Immigration Reform Campaign (2001-2007).
Title aside this mammoth project – co-directed by Shari Robertson and Michael Camerino – brilliantly captures the behind the scenes negotiations and counter tactics enacted by an entangled web of actors driving the immigration reform campaign. From immigrant rights advocates, lobbyists, policymakers, legislators, Senate and Whitehouse staffers, business groups to labour unions, and, of course, elected representatives both Democrat and Republican.
If you’re interested in the machinations and lessons to be learned in public campaigning and political strategy, this is certainly a drama worth watching. Aptly described by David R. Ayon (Senior Advisor, Woodrow Wilson Centre), this series offers ‘a vital rendering of policy and politics as an intensely human enterprise’. Capturing the often incongruous and impassioned dimension behind the US immigration reform campaign, ‘How Democracy Works Now’ gives unprecedented access to the nuts and bolts of backstage politics and highlights the centrality of immigration within the deepest pores of the American body politic.
At the end of June 2007 with six years of filming behind them, Robertson and Camerini put down their cameras. It was clear that the opportunity to pass an immigration reform bill (albeit massively compromised) had tragically passed. With a staggering 1,400 hours of footage in hand they doggedly set their sights on at least four years of editing – for any documentary filmmaker a challenge both daunting and exciting.
Robertson and Camerini’s documentary style is distinctive. Observational and quiet yet intuitively following the action, the camera hones in on key dramatic moments while avoiding sensationalism or loud assertions. In ‘How Democracy Works Now’ they reflect on what’s happening with measured voice-over, tuned to rendering deeper access for the viewer rather than kudos for the filmmaker.
Commenting on what they, as filmmakers, get back in return:
The tradeoff is the incredible privilege of getting inside a situation not as an actor, but as an almost invisible observer, moving in the midst of the action but often with a full 360-degree view of the stage. While that remarkable bubble of access lasts – and none of them last forever – you live a storyteller’s dream come true. And for months at a stretch, over six years, we inhabited this story’ (Capital Vérité:Inside Immigration Policymaking).
We first met Robertson and Camerini in 2008 when we invited them to Dublin for Moving Worlds: Cinemas of Migration to screen a previous film of theirs, ‘Well Founded Fear’, on the US asylum system. We had the added pleasure of exploring some rough assemblies and sequences from ‘How Democracy Works Now’ in a dedicated Moving Worlds workshop. Clearly at an early stage of the edit, they perhaps (wisely) hadn’t anticipated the scale of their project and led us through wonderfully raw and uneven footage, portraying the emotional highs and lows of the campaign alongside inevitable tensions between multiple actors wanting to get competing agendas over the line. A portrayal that could have easily been manipulated into rambunctious melodrama was carefully crafted by Robertson and Camerini to reveal the complexities and humane if at times painful compromises, on all sides.
Did anyone in the room that day in Dublin, other than Robertson and Camerini, imagine the epic nature of their project culminating in the final 12-part documentary film series? Having since been broadcast on HBO and doing the rounds of numerous circuits, including Human Rights Watch traveling film festival, ‘How Democracy Works Now’ is a hugely important film series. It invites us to understand immigration as a wholly rounded subject not isolated in policy talk or fenced off in media debates about border control and illegality or indeed couched in patronising liberal dogma. It allows viewers to see lateral connections across a range of players who might not want to be in the same room but are willing to persist in fixing a broken system through bipartisan reform – opening pathways to citizenship for approximately 12 million in 2008 down to 11 million undocumented immigrants in 2009.
Using storytelling as her guide, Robertson perfectly sums up the texture of this bigger picture: ‘We had no idea it would be like this – so rich, so necessarily reducible to small stories, individual lives and personal aspirations that intersect and cross back in all sorts of beautiful, unexpected ways’ (Capital Vérité:Inside Immigration Policymaking).
Like most gifted filmmakers, Robertson and Camerini portray an impressive cast of characters:
Arguably in a leading role is Frank Sharry (then Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum) now Director of America’s Voice and the late Senator Ted Kennedy, whose attempt to push immigration reform with conservative Senator Jon Kyle of Arizona in 2007 is illustrated in the HBO broadcast ‘The Senator’s Bargain’. But there’s a host of other characters, too. Not least, Esther Olavarria (then Senator Kennedy’s main staffer on immigration policy) now Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Or Alfredo Gutierrez (former Democratic State Senator from Arizona) now radio host at Radio Campesina. In addition to Cecelia Munoz (then Senior Vice President of Research, Advocacy and Legislation, National Council of La Raza) now Director of the Domestic Policy Council at the Whitehouse.
The list of protagonists driving the campaign is lengthy and fully fleshed out with individual bios, written by Robertson and Camerini, on the ‘How Democracy Works Now’ website.
With momentum currently building for immigration reform in the US, following the recent presidential election, and coming from all political and civic quarters, ‘How Democracy Works Now’ is most definitely a film series to re-engage with.
We’re aiming to put it on the agenda at ‘Moving Worlds: Cinemas of Migration’ and ‘One Stop Doc’ at Counterpoints Arts, and we’re pleased to have Frank Sharry (one of the main protagonists in ‘How Democracy Works Now’ and Director of America’s Voice) on our international advisory.
Here’s some interesting YouTube clips from the film series:
Reid and Schumer…played us like a fiddle
Alfredo Gutierrez to Radio Campesina: Language is what Unites Us
