Help a finish a film about a 12-year-old girl facing the arrest of her mom by immigration police!
We have just finished principal photography on a fiction feature film that aims to humanize some aspects of the immigration debate now raging, especially around the separation of families. “Collisions” is an engaging and entertaining story that is part buddy film, part road movie, and part “reverse coming of age story”. We are raising money for post production – $30,000 gets us to a complete cut of the film!
Why are we making this film?
When I began work on the script, my wife was a third grade teacher, and a child in her class recently had her father taken away and deported. It took weeks of building trust to find out why this girl, previously bright and engaged in class, was suddenly listless and prone to anger or tears at the slightest provocation. I interviewed her as part of my research. Her sadness, but also her bravery, hit me in the gut in a way that no headline or statistic ever could.
Immigration recently became one of the hottest topics with Obama’s executive action to stop the deportation of parents with US citizen children. Unfortunately this action has been blocked by a recent Supreme Court decision. The debate will reach fever pitch when the film is released in 2017, as the newly elected president has to decide whether to revoke the executive action. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of families continue to be forcibly separated every year. This film can be a focal point for those trying to understand the real families affected.
Synopsis
When twelve-year-old Itan, straight-A-smart, comes home from school in San Francisco, she is stunned to find their furniture up-ended, and no trace of her mother Yoana. Child Protective Services dumps Itan and her six-year-old brother Neto with their estranged uncle Evencio, a big rig truck driver. Itan can’t stand him. He’s arrogant, unreliable, and probably criminal. After a desperate search, Itan locates Yoana in an immigration detention center in Arizona and convinces Evencio to take them there.
They are propelled onto the road in Evencio’s truck, through the maddening labyrinth of immigration detention. Itan fights to free her mother before she is deported. But her mother keeps slipping from her grasp, as she is transferred from prison to prison. Their journey takes them through the deserts of the southern border, to sprawling truck stops, border patrol offices and secret immigration prisons.
In the close quarters of Evencio’s truck cab, Itan and Neto begin to bring a better man out of Evencio. But Evencio abandons them just when it seems they have a chance of stopping their mother’s deportation. Are they now truly on their own? Or will Evencio come through and reunite the family?
KJ