Hollywood movies, first-class scientific research institutions, universities, think tanks, powerful news media, deeply rooted messianic ideas among elites and grassroots, strong religious atmosphere, commodity culture that leads the trend of consumption, active innovation ability and open and free citizens... everything The lure associated with the "American Dream" is always irresistible. In order to realize them, generations of immigrants have weathered the storm for this, writing a heavy history of blood and tears with their own experiences.
In 2009, South African director Wayne Kramer brought his self-written and directed "Crossing Over", once again impacting our attention to immigration. With a group of vivid group portraits, he depicts the living conditions of this huge group in a penetrating manner. In the film, there are high school girls who are concerned by the FBI for their inciting activities related to immigration, skilled workers in Mexican factories, actresses who hope to get a green card by selling their bodies, hard-working musicians who hope to build their own business, and some because of their family. Korean teenagers who were involved in the conflict between two different cultures because of their single-mindedness in getting American citizenship, single mothers who were expelled from the camera because of their children...
These various people, they are just people like you and me, trying to immigrate Pursue a better life. Some of them are educated, some of them are not; some for escape from hardship, some for higher happiness... In any case, in exchange for a passport to legally reside in this "Elysium", they are in goodness and morality, loyalty Struggling and hovering on the edge of betrayal, hell and heaven, and fighting against the judgment of their own destiny again and again, they are cruel and hopeless.
With this realistic theme, Wayne Kramer uncovered the humiliating and bloody history of today's illegal immigrants, and created an excellent window to restore the truth of reality for the people who yearn for the "land of freedom". The movie is by no means nostalgic and curious, it is the most authentic white paper on the status of illegal immigration in the world. The same ideological shock occurred at the moment when I watched the Korean movie "Escape to the North" - that movie that focused on the tragic family in the desperate plight who longed to "escape to the North" but finally had no way to escape, let me watch it After that, I felt the depression with nowhere to escape.
The United States of America, Europe, and even South Korea, how elegant and noble the country names are, but they contain a historical nightmare that has no place to accuse. While the "legal citizens" of these countries are dreaming, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are in a certain ocean or desert, fighting arduously against the cruel and harsh environment for smuggling, and struggling painfully for legal status. on the cross of spirit and flesh. Every day people drown in the ocean, every day they are buried in the sand dunes, every day they die tragically at the gunpoint of border guards, every day they are tracked, arrested, censored, and deported... These seem to be legitimate pursuits. People with power have lost the chance to dream forever.
Revisiting these bitter stories that are often seen on the news in the film, as if glimpsed in their eyes, the "freeland" of the United States reduced to hell. Those who originally had hope, those who used to live comfortably, lived through the most painful years of their lives in this gorgeous desert that was like a prison. Fragmentation, physical and mental damage, soul corruption and a never-ending hunt for escape. These tragic facts that cannot be ignored have shrouded the obscure and gloomy atmosphere of New York City, which is singing every night. From time to time, it will expose the shameful scars of human rights abuses on its body and torture the souls of the world.
Tracing the origin, the immigrants who came to the San Francisco Bay a century and a half ago all came from the same human instinct to pursue freedom and happiness. The history of world immigration, which has been in the ascendant so far, is a symphony of human destiny echoing in the sky. When the light of the "Mayflower Convention" and "Declaration of Independence" proclaimed in the New World that all people are created equal, have the inalienable right to life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, and other truths, the tragic history is the destiny of mankind The symphony plays the most tragic chapter. And every immigrant is a sad note in the melody, which is worthy of the people all over the world to recall and reflect on.
President Lincoln said it well, whoever does not give freedom to others should not be free themselves. The words of the sages seem to have marked a serious theme for the symphony of human destiny that is far from the end - thought-provoking and lingering, ironically ironing the ignorance, prejudice and madness that go hand in hand in the history of world immigration. At the same time, on the immortal Statue of Liberty in New York Bay in the east of the United States, inscribed with the Jewish poetess Emma Lazarus's still heart-warming verse:
Welcome,
those weary and poor,
crowded Together the masses who yearn to breathe freely,
the bustling abandoned,
poor people. Give me
these homeless,
devastated people . I hold high the light of freedom for you!…
It all seems so utopia, but it is not the utopia of the American model. At the end of the movie, the lucky man who devoutly swore to become a new citizen of the United States under the giant star-striped banner, and the Mexican female corpse who died violently on the smuggling road suddenly formed a set of two abrupt and distorted pictures, which appeared silently in front of my eyes. At that moment, I felt my body tremble involuntarily. Only a tolerant soil can breed freedom, vitality and creativity, and an open society is a confident, attractive and truly cohesive society. Let's not forget that immigration has always played a part in the prosperity and prosperity of those economic powerhouses. If the Statue of Liberty is their last spiritual belief, please don't let these people who worship her devoutly become sacrificers one after another, dying tragically in the pursuit of her asylum.
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