Entre Nos
(2009/IndiePix DVD)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Feature: C+
The
immigrant experience is one that used to be readily available and accessible to
people and at a time when it was assumed that going to the U.S. was the
ultimate place to be because of progress and opportunity. That still exists, but on a smaller level as
the country has endured the Reagan Era and is now going through the Right Wing
sponsored anti-immigrant movement that is one of the most explicitly racist of
any kind in decades. Paola Mendoza and
Gloria La Morte have made Entre Nos (2009)
based on Miss Mendoza’s life and what her mother went through when she was very
young.
The story
has Mariana (Mendoza) with a few children (playing a variant of her mother)
finding out that her husband has abandoned her.
Instead of staying where she is and apparently knows more people, she
goes to a city in Florida
where he may have gone to and gets stuck there in one bad situation after
another. We have seen this story before,
but this is told well enough here, yet there are unintended issues with the
narrative (in logic in part) and maybe transplanting the tale from decades ago
to now might have been an issue. Still,
it is a god work and the sad thing about her trying to sell empanadas she bakes
so well and with no success suggests that maybe if her husband remained, they
could have opened a successful restaurant or the like. We also never find out what happened to him,
which does matter and leaves a hoe in the story, including him not being held
responsible for what he did, even if he never resurfaced in person.
However,
the anti-immigrant movement would like to exploit the limits of such a work (if
they actually knew it existed or were not afraid of it) to warn people to stay
away. In some ways, the story here is
actually not over.
The anamorphically
enhanced 1.78 X 1 image was shot on digital High Definition video and is soft,
can have motion blur and other depth and detail limits. Sometimes the image is just fine, but not
often enough. The Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo can become rather monophonic and some audio is affected during location
taping that was not redone. Extras
include a trailer, PSA on immigration, Behind The Scenes featurette, How To Make Empanadas, feature length
audio commentary by the directors and Mendoza’s
short Still Standing.
- Nicholas Sheffo
