Well-Founded Fear

An unprecedented inside look at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), award-winning filmmakers Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini take their cameras behind locked doors, where bureaucrats decide the fates of thousands of asylum-seekers each year. To be granted asylum, applicants must demonstrate a "well-founded fear" that their lives would be endangered were they to be deported. The asylum-seekers are at once hopeful and heartbreaking, at times too slick and polished, and in other cases painfully timid. All have the same desire--freedom to stay in America. As asylum officers struggle to determine credibility, balancing sympathy with good sense and tough-mindedness, their hard-made decisions ultimately hold a mirror to the broader, quickly changing, and controversial role of the United States in the world at large.

I think my recent quest to gain new viewpoints was sparked by the presidential elections - my acquiring this film form the library was part of that process. Like The Visitor, but in a different way, this film too made me think about the immigration question as it applied to people, not just numbers and statistics. And what of the INS workers who have to make these horrible decisions? They are people too. A complicated issue, but a film everyone should see.