Well-founded fear /
Documentary about the American asylum system that takes viewers within the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (pre-9/11), where bureaucrats ponder the sometimes life-or-death fate of immigrants seeking asylum. Includes confidential conversations between asylum officers and refugees, p...
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| Other Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Video |
| Language: | English Chinese Albanian French Russian Spanish |
| Language Notes: | Narration and much dialog In English. Some interviewees speak in Albanian, Chinese, French, Russian, or Spanish, and most are supplied orally with contemporaneous approximate translation. All the oral English is also represented in an optional transcript sidebar. The non-English dialog is accompanied by English subtitles. |
| Published: |
[New York, N.Y.] :
Epidavros Project,
[2000]
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| Online Access: | Connect to this streaming video (Kanopy) |
| Summary: | Documentary about the American asylum system that takes viewers within the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (pre-9/11), where bureaucrats ponder the sometimes life-or-death fate of immigrants seeking asylum. Includes confidential conversations between asylum officers and refugees, plus their translators and lawyers. It is the task of the asylum officer to identify where there exists a "well-founded fear" that an applicant's life may be placed in jeopardy by deportation. But with thousands of applicants, and with the number of fraudulent cases perhaps equaling the number of legitimate cases, the officers acknowledge that truth and justice are elusive and that subjectivity can play a decisive hand in their evaluations. While including horrific testimonials of torture and grievous accounts of loss, the film also demonstrates that the outcome can be impacted by personality and prejudice, by an officer's level of experience (with naiveté easily morphing into cynicism), by the applicant's credibility, and even by an interpreter's translation of a testimony. |
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| Item Description: | Title and statement of responsibility from opening credits. Originally produced as a documentary in 2000. Television broadcast premiere on PBS: in the "P.O.V." (Point of View) series, 2000 June 5. Some oral translation by the applicants' translators on-screen differs from text of translation in subtitles.. "Every person who agreed to be filmed gave up the protection of ... confidentiality to help tell this story."--Opening credits. This streaming version lacks special features of some videodiscs such as "The hazards of translation" (outtake). |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (1 streaming video file (approximately 119 min. 54 sec.) : sound, color |
| Format: | Streaming video; aspect ratio 1.66:1. Mode of access: World Wide Web. |
| Audience: | Not rated. Has some oral recounting of torture and violence. |
| Awards: | Sundance Film Festival nominee for Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, 2000. San Francisco International Film Festival, 2000: Certificate of Merit in Film & Video--Current Events. |
| Production Credits: | Produced and directed by Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini ; edited by Karen Schmeer, Christopher Osborn, Suzanne Pancrazi ; camera, Michael Camerini ; music composed and conducted by Mark Suozzo ; sound, John Dildine. |