If you tune into PBS’s P.O.V. on Thursday (as you should), you will see Short Cuts, a collection of short films, including 3 animated shorts from StoryCorps and the Academy Award-nominated The Barber of Birmingham. You will also see a film that hits close to home: Sin País, the story of the Mejia family, a mixed-immigration status family in San Francisco, trying to stay together after the parents are deported back to Guatemala. The film started as a thesis project at Stanford and has already won a Student Academy Award. The young director of the film, Theo Rigby, lives in San Francisco. In July, Theo, who is, not surprisingly a really nice guy, invited me to his studio in Dogpatch to discuss the film and what drew him to explore the human side of the immigration debate.
When Theo entered Stanford’s film program in 2008, he was already interested in the lives of immigrants. As a documentary photographer, he had traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border and immersed himself in the culture, learning about mixed-status families and the liminal lives they lead there. Theo became deeply involved in the stories of the people he was photographing, even helping one woman and her daughter raise money to get out of jail when they were caught by Border Patrol. His connection with that family went from being scientific to personal and Theo says: “After that whole experience, all these immigration issues that we read about and see in the news, kind of like talking point issues, became super real.”