Directed by Robert M. Young • 1977 • United States
Starring Domingo Ambriz, Trinidad Silva, Linda Gillin
In ¡ALAMBRISTA!, a Mexican farmworker sneaks across the border to California to make money to send to his family back home. It is a story that happens every day, told here in an uncompromising, groundbreaking work of realism from American independent filmmaker Robert M. Young. Vivid and spare where other films about illegal immigration might sentimentalize, Young’s take is equal parts intimate character study and gripping road movie, a political work that never loses sight of the complex man at its center. ¡ALAMBRISTA!, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s inaugural Caméra d'Or in 1978, remains one of the best films ever made on this perennially relevant topic.
Up Next in The Immigrants
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Stroszek
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1977 • West Germany
Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens ScheitzWerner Herzog’s tragically absurd tour through 1970s America stars the singular Bruno S. as an ostracized, alcoholic Berlin street musician who, joined by a prostitute (Eva Mattes) and his eccentric el...
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. . . And the Pursuit of Happiness
Directed by Louis Malle • 1986 • United States
In 1986, Louis Malle, himself a transplant to the United States, set out to investigate the ever-widening range of immigrant experience in America. Interviewing a variety of newcomers (from teachers to astronauts to doctors) in middle- and working-c...
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La haine
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz • 1995 • France
Starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd TaghmaouiMathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with LA HAINE, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-in...
