immigration
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Five Questions for I Learn America‘s Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng
The coming-of-age tale is a durable independent film genre, but it takes on added political and personal dimensions in I Learn America, Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng’s documentary about five new teenage immigrants within New York’s public school system. Dissard, a dual citizen who immigrated himself from France when he was a teenager (and with whom I worked with on Raising Victor Vargas), and Peng, an education reform expert who worked in the Bloomberg administration, embrace within the film the emotional complexity of their subjects’ lives while an exhaustive outreach campaign amplifies its various messages and policy implications. I Learn […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 13, 2013 -
Eduardo Lopez and Wendy Thompson-Marquez on Harvest of Empire
My first ancestors to come to America journeyed on the Mayflower in 1620; it’s hard to have a heritage more firmly rooted in America’s beginnings and long history. Just under a hundred years ago, however, my grandmother on my father’s side left her native Holland and sailed into New York harbor, passing through Ellis Island before moving west with her parents. Growing up, I was much prouder of my Dutch heritage and status as a third-generation American than of my ancestors who established Plymouth Colony 300 years earlier. In the 1990s, I learned Spanish and spent two years living and […]
by Randy Astle on Sep 25, 2012
