Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The dreams of a Costa Rican family





“Being in two places at once … like walking in between …” A US documentary observes the dreams of a Costa Rican family.

Not Here, Not There [Ni aquí, ni allá] (2009) written, directed and produced by Betsy Haley Hershey 63 minutos

Like many recent films on the subject, Betsy Haley Hershey’s debut documentary feature Not Here, Not There succeeds in painting the large picture of Latin American illegal immigration to the United States through a small-scale family story. The director met them in rural Costa Rica several years ago in an exchange program. Making a meager living in a coffee plantation, four of the six siblings trekked to the US and landed restaurant jobs in the East Coast, where other people from their small mountain village had settled. The parents stayed behind with the two youngest, a boy and a girl, Salomé. It is a middle class family, aspiring to higher education and understanding the realities of an interconnected world.

Between 2006 and 2008, the director observed how the family dynamics was shaped by two geographical locations, two languages and wildly contrasting cultures - split between the “here” and “there” of the title. Half-way through the shooting, the family is struck by tragedy. Astutely, the filmmaker combined the techniques of direct cinema – requiring long hours of shooting and remarkable editing skills – with the abundant visual materials supplied by the family members themselves: home videos, photographs and letters.

What emerges in Not Here, Not There is a beautiful and poignant family portrait built as a counterpoint between life in the United States – access to material goods but the looming threat of deportation– and the rural scenes of a emotionally fulfilling Costa Rican home, where progress is limited. This pendulum is at first somewhat disconcerting to the audience; we are lost about the exact physical and psychological whereabouts of the six siblings and their parents, since there is no objective narrator or chronological timeline to explain the sequence of events. It is a crosscutting technique, however, that will pay good dividends: it not only provides the pendular structure of the documentary, but also reflects its very meaning, nicely encapsulated in the title. “Your body is in one place, your heart in another”, the Costa Rican wife of the older brother explains to the director, thus providing a rationale to the open-ended story unfolding on the screen.

Who can be familiar with the many documentaries exploring the immigration conundrum with ethnographic zeal? So Ms. Hershey may not know that her film, much like Zulay, Facing the 21st Century (1989), by renowned documentarian Jorge Preloran, ends ups giving the subjects of her picture a strong directorial role. Many years in the making, the Los Angeles-based Argentine filmmaker and UCLA professor documented with his anthropologist wife Mabel, the process of uprooting undergone by a young Otavalo Indian from Ecuador, who came to live with them in Los Angeles. Such was the involvement of Zulay Saravino in the filmic recording of her cultural and emotional changes – including a strong presence in the editing choices – that Preloran gave her a directing credit. A similar process seems to be at work in Not Here, Not There: the documentary is firmly held by the candid narration provided by Salomé, a naturally eloquent young voice, and the home movies supplied by her older brothers.

Also, like the heart-warming, heart-wrenching and equally open-ended Mexican feature by Patricia Riggen, La misma luna (Under the Same Moon, 2007), Not Here, Not There cannot have a resolution. For the illegal immigrants of this family, struggling in the “Here” of the United States, the American Dream is intangible; from the “There” of Costa Rica, the American Dream becomes a Rorschach inkblot into which they see their many aspirations. The film chooses to end with two of the brothers retracing the steps of their dangerous first journey from Costa Rica to the United States. Where is their home …?

What will captivate the viewers of this topnotch documentary is the delicate touch with which Ms. Hershey reveals the all too human and universal longings of a family like us.


Not Here, Not There has been seen in a few festivals and collected several awards over the past year. More information is available at http://www.notherenotthere.com/
I hope the documentary receives the exposure and recognition it deserves.