By Stephanie Schorow
Globe Correspondent / March 27, 2008
A young John F. Kennedy at a Bunker Hill Day Festival in Charlestown, as shown in the documentary, The Green Square Mile: The Story of the Charlestown Irish, which will be part of the Lowell Film Festival April 4 and 5. (The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston)
The city that once buzzed with the hum of looms soon will be abuzz with the murmur of movie soundtracks as a series of documentaries and feature films examines one of the day's most divisive political issues.
Immigration - past and ongoing - will be explored in more than 20 short and feature-length films showing April 4 and 5 as part of the first Lowell Film Festival.
"Immigration has always been a big part of Lowell's industrial history," said Robert Forrant, festival organizer and professor of regional economic and social development at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. "Thematically, it makes sense to think about immigration in an all-American city."
The festival has also joined forces to promote other Lowell film-related events in April: the third annual Lowell Youth Matters Film Festival; Cambodian Expressions: A Film and Art Festival (which also examines the immigrant experience); and a tribute next Wednesday to screen icon and Lowell native Bette Davis.
The film festival will tackle the full range of the immigrant experience, including stories of the Irish, Italian, Latino, Cambodian, and Caribbean people who came to - or tried to come to - America.
The 28-minute film, "Detained," which screens at 2 p.m. April 5 at the Revolving Museum, 22 Shattuck St., documents the searing impact of a March 6, 2007, raid by federal officials on a New Bedford factory. About 360 workers were detained under suspicion of being in the country illegally. Director Jenny Alexander of Malden, a former union and community organizer now working for Northern Light Productions and her own company, ActiveVistaMedia, wanted to tell the story of some of those workers.
"I hoped to create a film where the audience could, if only for a minute, sense what the families experienced - where for a minute an audience might move beyond the current rhetoric around immigration and be able to 'see' the individuals: the mothers, fathers, and children," Alexander said.
She focuses on an 8-month-old baby whose mother was detained. The baby, who was still breast-feeding, had a fever and was not eating, and neither the father nor volunteers could locate the mother. The baby was rushed to an emergency room.
"I ended up following the father and the baby, because it seemed unlikely that people would believe what was happening unless they saw it," Alexander said. "As the days unfolded, so many stories emerged."
Producer Michelle Fuentes and Alexander started filming interviews to add a human dimension to the controversial issue.
"I believe that politically driven rhetoric has obscured our country's ability to have meaningful discourse around immigration," Alexander said. "Due process is being pushed aside in the rush to deport people."
While Alexander encapsulates a moment, Maureen McNamara of Kendall Productions in Cambridge captures the centuries. Her 80-minute documentary "The Green Square Mile: Story of the Charlestown Irish," which screens at 12:30 p.m. April 5 at the Pollard Library, ranges from the Colonial period to the present to examine the history of the Irish in Charlestown.
Today it's hard to believe that once Boston was the most inhospitable place on the planet for the Irish because of the resentment of the mostly English Bostonians, McNamara said. Such prejudice was manifest in the burning down of an Ursuline convent and school in 1834 in Charlestown and a riot on Broad Street in Boston in 1837. Yet the Irish persevered and prospered and Charlestown became a bit of Irish green.
"For me, it's like a village in Ireland," McNamara said.
While the first half of the documentary is "very History Channel," with still images from libraries and archives, the second half focuses on the community's lively social history, with interviews and rare footage, according to McNamara.
"We have some wonderful home movies from the 1930s and 1940s," McNamara said. "It's a warts-and-all portrait" with scenes from antibusing protests and interviews shot in Ireland, including one with Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. Still the film is meant to "engender townie pride" about Charlestown's colorful past and evolving present.
When asked if her film has relevance for today's discourse on immigration, McNamara practically shouted the answer: "Absolutely."
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This article appeared in the Boston Globe Northwest Weekly on Thursday, March 27, 2008