La Ciudad (The City)

The City is one of the most important (and true) American films yet. David Riker has found the key to perfection in non-sensationalism. He has told the rarely told truth of one of our most glamourized cities. His passion for these people shows. The courage he displays by making this film the way he wanted to, in Spanish, intensifies the beautifully filmed, emotionally moving scenes. David Riker is my hero! He is the most non-sold out director I've found. If you have the chance, SEE THIS FILM!

La Ciudad is a wonderful, and beautiful movie with twisting story lines. Its black and white imagery gives us a feeling of being there; the vacant lot along the East River waterfront, the empty lot in Bushwick, the streets of Mott Haven, the sweatshops. I will say that my opinion of the movie is slightly tainted. I got to view it at New York's Museum of the Moving Image and met the director afterwards to talk about the film's unique production. Filmed over years, using black and white film was actually a necessity in order to create consistancy in lighting. The stories that make up the film's parts were developed by the actors shown in the film; which may explain its lack of any Hollywood-type ending. This is a good film to watch.

La Ciudad is a very silent movie. I think the overall silence brings out a lot about what these immigrants really feel. The focus is on their faces (thus the photo studio), and on what they live through each vignette. That is how it says a lot without having to go deep into the short stories it presents. Its being black & white also helps to set the tone, one of helplessness, one of being lost. It also helps present the movie as a documentary for a mainstream audience which I think is a rather clever way to reach the targeted audience. The question is how well does it represent the latino immigrant experience? Pretty good, I think. Definitely something to see.

La Ciudad tells four stories of what illegal immigrant life is like in New York City. It is a black and white film with English subtitles. The first story depicts the life of illegal immigrants trying to find any work. A Italian man tells and hires a few of the Hispanic men for fifty dollars a day, and loads them in a truck and takes them to a site with broken down buildings. The Hispanics are supposed to clean and stack bricks for only fifteen cents each, not the fifty dollars they were promised by the Italian man.

The second story deals with a young man, Francisco, who just arrived in America and is looking for his Uncle. As he is searching for his Uncle's apartment, he hears music from a wedding and decides to go and see what is going on. There he meets a girl, Maria, who he dances with and begins to talk to her. After the wedding is over, both Francisco and Maria go back to her apartment, where Francisco spends the night on the couch and plans to have breakfast with Maria in the morning. When he wakes up, he realized that there is no food to eat and decides to go and buy some food. On his way back from picking up food, he realized he had no idea where he was and even how to get back to her apartment.

The third story is about a homeless Hispanic man and his daughter. The man takes his daughter and tries to enroll her in school; however, he is unable to do so because he has no address or telephone bill. The schools needed proof that he lived in the city, and with no proof he could not enroll her in school.

Finally, the fourth story is about a woman, Ana, who works in a sewing factory. The factory has not paid any of the employees for approximately a month, and the workers cannot do anything about it. They just hope and pray that they will get a paycheck the next week. She gets a phone call from back home and discovers that her daughter is ill and she needs four hundred dollars to pay medical bills. She asks her employer to pay her because she needs to pay medical bills; however, her boss says that they don't have the money. She also tried to sell dresses to a dress store however the store would not accept dresses from someone on the street. Finally, Ana became fed up and decided not to work at the factory and just sat at her sewing machine and would not work until she was paid. Then all of the other workers one by one began to stop working as well.

This movie is heartfelt. It shows what an illegal immigrant's life is like and the conditions they live and work in. It really opened my eyes more. I actually saw some of the atrocities that immigrants are put through each day. This movie is extremely powerful. It really makes each person think about why this happens. I'm sure many people think that immigrants who come into the United States live just as good of lives as everyone else, but that is not the case. This movie is an important movie for each person to see. But don't let me be the judge of this movie, watch it yourself and make up your own mind!

David Riker's neo-realist drama "The City" looks at the plight of Latin American immigrants in New York. Filmed in black and white, starring a mostly unknown cast, and spoken mostly in Spanish, this movie tests your attention span but makes perfectly clear how much these people struggling to survive. The only other movie that I know that draws this much attention to the immigrants' plight is Herbert Biberman's "Salt of the Earth", which Biberman made while blacklisted.

If you don't feel something for the characters, then you have no soul. As the Latin American population in the United States continues to grow, movies like this will become all the more important. Highly recommended.