White Pine Pictures


 

INVISIBLE NATION: POLICING THE UNDERGROUND
55 min. 54 sec.

 

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A riveting, often frightening journey into the cat and mouse world of immigration police and illegal immigrants. Shot over a six month period in Toronto, Canada, the film documents the moral, emotional and legal collision between illegal and investigator. Between hunter and hunted.

The filmmakers negotiated extraordinary access to film Canadian Immigration investigators on the job: raiding factories and homes, arresting and deporting. Sometimes the illegals are criminals; sometimes they are only dreamers. Always there are raw human consequences. And the pull of history.

All industrialized countries today have an "immigration problem". Policy and opinion are divided about the illegals. But as the world grows hungrier and the poor hope more fiercely, illegals will keep flooding our shores.

INVISIBLE NATION examines immigration enforcement. Startling and poignant, it's a documentary that challenges easy opinions and comforting stereotypes; that makes human the face of a nation.

"A tough and uncompromising look at immigration enforcement. Tracey's camera becomes almost a participant in these dramas, as it glides down apartment corridors, scrutinizes a scowling hoodlum and peers curiously through a grille at the handcuffed suspect riding in the back seat. Weaving these elements together is the near-poetic narration that rhapsodizes about previous generations of immigrants as "hoisting a nation on their backs."

Henry Mietkiewicz, Toronto Star


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