Qualche giorno fa, dopo aver scritto del Border Film Project, ho deciso di contattare Brett Huneycutt, Rudy Adler and Victoria Criado, gli ideatori ed organizzatori del progetto. Volevo capire meglio alcuni aspetti del progetto e ho inviato loro le mie domande. Ecco le loro risposte in inglese.

When I wrote about the Border Film Project, few days ago, I decided I wanted to know more about it and got in touch with Brett Huneycutt, Rudy Adler and Victoria Criado who are the people behind it. I asked them a few questions and here are their interesting answers.

1. How did the idea of the project developed?

While shooting a documentary about immigration issues and the Minuteman Project this summer, we found ourselves unable to capture the actual journey of migrants crossing through the desert. One day, we were filming a young mother and her three children at a migrant
house in Altar, a Mexican town 60 miles south of the border. We tried to warn them of the dangers they were going to encounter in the coming days, but our words fell on deaf ears. Before leaving, Victoria dug through her purse, looking for a piece of candy or toy for one of the
young daughters. Unable to find anything, we began joking about giving the little girl our camera equipment. And then we stopped joking and thought “Wait, we cant give her our video camera, but we could give her a small picture camera.”

2. How did you manage to organise it?

We just went out and bought hundreds of disposable cameras. We knew we could only hope for about 10-20% of the cameras back given the situation, so it became a numbers game. We packaged them in stamped, pre-addressed envelopes, set up a PO Box in Scottsdale, Arizona to receive the cameras, and drove to migrant houses along the entire border and explained the project to migrants that were days, and sometimes hours, away from crossing. We got an amazing response. Many times the demand for cameras exceeded the amount we had in the car. We also devised an economic incentive scheme of those that participated.
In each envelope, we included a gift card (to a major US retailer with locations along the border) with a zero balance. When we receive cameras back, all we have to do is look up the camera number in our database, and put $50 on that card for the migrant to use. That way,
the migrant stays anonymous and doesn’t have to reveal his or her contact info.

3. What do you hope to achieve with it?

Our original goal was to show ordinary Americans with little knowledge of immigration issues what that journey looks like through the eyes of the migrant. But after distributing hundreds of cameras, we realized that the people most likely to come out to the exhibit to see the
photos will be those that already care about these issues, and for us, that kind of defeated the purpose of the project. So in order to widen the audience, we distributed cameras to the Minuteman volunteers and asked them to document their lives on the border. It seemed like a
natural extension of the project. And we really wanted to try and bridge some of the imaginary gaps that we saw between opposing sides of the immigration debate. The immigration issue is very complex and we found that groups on opposing sides of the debate should listen to
each other more because they might be surprised where their arguments intersect. The truth usually falls in the middle. We found the often-criticized Minutemen to be genuinely interesting people. We wanted to do a project that would unite people, not divide them.
People shut you off if you try to tell them what to believe. Michael Moore is completely ineffective now in creating an environment for any real change. We present both sides and let people make up their own mind.

4. What kind of response have you had so far from the two groups involved?

We have had a lot of support. We hope to donate the proceeds of the event to all of the photographers.

5. In which galleries are you planning to show the final pictures?

We would like to make the show as widespread as possible and are looking to display the pictures at art galleries throughout the United States, Mexico and all over the world if possible. To date, galleries in Boston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Omaha, Oxford, San Salvador, and Paris
have expressed interest in the show.

6. Would you consider bringing the pictures to Europe as well?

Absolutely. We would love to do a European Tour of the pictures. We just need an invitation.

Well, I hope the exibition in Oxford and Paris will be confirmed soon and many other galleries in Europe will show their interest too.