Living at Risk / Phans of Jersey City

Friday | October 12, 2018 7:00 pm

Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family

Directed by Alfred Guzzetti, Susan Meiselas and Richard Rogers

The Phans of Jersey City

Directed by Abbie H. Fink, Stephen L. Forman, John N. Fraker and Dennis Lanson

By the late 70s, the raw naturalism of cinema vérité and observational cinema were a refreshing challenge to former expository documentary norms. And the Marshall/Asch method, borrowed from anthropology, of spending long sojourns with the films’ subjects had, by this time, played out on broadcast television in the series An American Family (1973). Filmmakers embedded themselves within families or societies to achieve an uncommon intimacy. Although their subjects were aware of the camera, they let their guard down as if the camera were a friend in whom they could confide. Audiences marveled at the commonalities and the differences revealed through new windows into others’ private lives.

The subjects of both the films in this program are cinematic rarities. At the time, the values of both suburban, middle-to-upper-class families portrayed somewhat reflected those of the average American; however, war in their homelands forced them to undergo extended periods of transition and trauma—irreparably changing circumstances, family structure and individual goals and dreams. American viewers—many biased by propaganda—were able to glance into a cinematic mirror slightly altered by culture and by circumstances their own government abetted.

PROGRAM

Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family

Directed by Alfred Guzzetti, Susan Meiselas and Richard Rogers.
US/Nicaragua, 1985, 16mm transferred to digital video, color, 59 min.
Spanish and English with English subtitles.
Copy source: Alfred Guzzetti

Photographer Susan Meiselas documented the Sandanista revolution in her iconic book Nicaragua, June 1978 – July 1979, and she returned to make Living at Risk with Alfred Guzzetti and Richard Rogers in the midst of the war with the Contras. Originally broadcast on PBS, the film features the Barrios, a middle-class family both activated and fractured by the conflict. Instead of fleeing their country, the siblings are guided by a religious and socialist desire to help those most vulnerable and destitute, mostly peasants in the rural areas. Many in the Barrios’ clan joined the Sandinista Front (FSLN) and gave up their original career plans in order to provide medical services to the poor, aid farmer cooperatives or organize communities in the barrios. The risk of working in areas targeted by the Contras was overridden by a communal civic sense and dedication to supporting the health of their country in a direct way.

The Phans of Jersey City

Directed by Abbie H. Fink, Stephen L. Forman, John N. Fraker and Dennis Lanson.
US, 1979, 16mm transferred to digital video, color, 49 min.
Copy source: Documentary Educational Resources

Catching up with the Phans a few years after Saigon fell and the family had to resettle in the US, the filmmakers present an understated, intimate portrait of an upper-class South Vietnamese family who were forced to make many adjustments along their journey to suburbia. Thrown into a very different socioeconomic bracket, the adults struggle with mediocre employment, overt discrimination, and simply coming to terms with the lives and loved ones they’ve left behind. For the eldest daughter—who had her own business in Vietnam and is now the family’s housekeeper—the difference is painful and stark. Her father, a shell-shocked Colonel Phan, spends his days wrapped in dreams of bygone glory and has stopped speaking to his oldest son, who is dating an Ecuadorian woman. This revelatory slice of 70s America stops short of an objective sociological study with its unabashed disclosures, camera confessionals and a bittersweet warmth that pervades the candid scenes of the family at home.