"The City" is a movie to treasure. It tells four stories about recent illegal immigrants to New York City. They come from Mexico and further south in Latin America, and they carry the hopes of their families at home that they will send back money from the promised land. It doesn't work that way. Although the TV news and music videos have drilled us to think of Latin Americans in terms of flash and style, music and sometimes drugs, the characters in this movie come from an entirely different world. They are hard-working people, who come from a world where they were respected. After all, anyone who goes to the trouble of becoming an illegal immigrant is, by definition, one of the most confident and ambitious citizens in his home community. The losers would be afraid to try. New York, we see, offers little. Men line the streets hoping to be hired as day laborers, and the cops threaten to sweep them away--for the crime of wanting to work. They're paid 15 cents apiece to scrape and hammer the mortar off of old bricks. In another story, a woman gets a job in a garment sweatshop, where piecework workers are hired and fired on whim. A man lives in his car and supports himself with a portable Punch and Judy show; he wants to enroll his daughter in school, which is their legal right, but because he has no permanent address no school will have her. And in a more hopeful story, a young man meets a woman and they fall in love--but the city defies them to be happy. "The City (La Ciudad)" was written and directed by David Riker, who comes out of the New York University Film School; fellow graduates like Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese have also been interested in the streets. It was photographed by Harlan Bosmajian, whose b&w work is realistic and poetic. One is reminded of "Bicycle Thief."
Review of La Ciudad (the City)
La Ciudad (the City)
(1998)
Heartbreaking stories of immigrants in New York
19 October 1999
Warning: Spoilers