What Is This Film Really About?
Homeland recently attended a Community Cinema screening of the Independent Lens documentary, “Welcome to Shelbyville”. It’s a film about a small Tennessee town dealing with a growing population of Somali refugees following a previous influx of Hispanic immigrants.
There was a well-attended discussion following the film, which we wrote about on Friday. We also talked to several people on camera and asked them what they thought the film was about, at its core.
Those responses (featured in the video below) weren’t exactly a surprise—a lot of people said it was a film about the fear of the unknown, about the need to be more open-minded to different cultures and religions, and to be more welcoming to immigrants as a country.
For how diverse the crowd was, they were very similarly minded. Many in the audience were immigrants themselves or worked for immigration related agencies. As discussion moderator Nate Johnson noted, the evening was a bit like preaching to the choir.
Though really, who wouldn’t cry “fear of the unknown” when looking at some of the more “shocking” moments of ignorance in the movie. When one town resident says, “From what I know about Muslims, they’re out to kill us, we know that from nine-one-one” I want to find the guy and say, “Are you for real?”
Yet when I see shots of the Muslim women in the grocery store in their long, ghostly robes I have to wonder how open-minded I would be to this strange looking group who can’t communicate in a common language.
But when some of the residents decide to get together and meet their new neighbors, they discover their fears are unfounded. And that’s what the film is really about—getting to know the people in your own community better and realizing that they probably want the same things out of life that you do.
Take a look at the clip and hear what members of the community thought of the film. You can see “Welcome to Shelbyville” yourself on Nine PBS at 11:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 29 and leave your own comments here or on our Facebook page.
Category: Immigration 101
