The New Americans
The New Americans is a seven-hour American documentary, produced by Kartemquin Films, which was originally broadcast on American television over three nights on the Public Broadcasting Service in late March 2004.
Description
The observational documentary, which includes minimal voice-over narration and very little direct interviewing of its subjects, follows the lives of a series of immigrants to the United States over the course of four years. The series was filmed between 1998 and 2001, although not all of its subjects were filmed during that entire length of time. The immigrants were filmed both in their countries of origin before immigrating as well as in the United States. The filming during this period was extensive and occurred in the subjects' homes, at their places of work, in government offices, and in a number of other situations, many of them quite intimate. As a result, The New Americans offers an unusually personal and comprehensive look at the people it profiles.Topics
The immigrants profiled and filmed in The New Americans include many immigrants from diverse backgrounds:- a group of baseball players from the Dominican Republic hoping to secure a career in Major League Baseball
- a computer programmer from India and his wife
- a family with six children from a farming community in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico
- a family of Ogoni refugees from Nigeria
- a woman from Palestine who moves to the United States to be with her new husband, a first-generation Palestinian-American who grew up in Chicago
- Chicago
- Silicon Valley, California
- Garden City, Kansas and Mecca, California
- Florida, Georgia, and Montana.
Production
Steve James commented on the making of the New Americans, “From the beginning, we knew we wanted to tell multiple stories, because every immigrant I’ve met has a very rich and varied story to tell about where they come from. We also were excited about the idea of telling these people’s stories before they left their countries so that we could begin to understand these people in their own country before they gave it all up to come here. They’re all facing different problems different dreams, so there’s that diversity too. They’re a nice collection of stories because their differences and similarities.”