The Oscar-nominated live-action short “A Lien,” directed by David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz, is a cry for help. Not just from the characters. Not just from the filmmakers. It represents a truth about our immigration system that leaves many innocent people feeling helpless, afraid and separated from anyone who can lend a hand in the situation. By the film’s end, we have been experiencing a story that is built like a thriller, but has its roots in a systemic failure by all authorities involved.
In the film, a married couple, Sofia (Victoria Ratermanis) and Oscar Gomez (William Martinez), arrive at an immigration office with their young daughter, Nina (Karolyn Rivera), in tow. Oscar is there to be interviewed for his green card. He has all the paperwork, all the forms signed and is ready for a stressful, but hopeful, day that has been a long time coming. He brings Nina to the interview with him and Sofia stays behind in the waiting room where there are other hopeful citizens who will be going through the same process.
What happens to these people might not surprise you, but the coda at the film’s end might drive the point home in a way you might not expect.
I have seen two films by the Cutler-Kreutzes (I programmed their latest short film “Trapped” at last year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival), and I have great admiration for how they manage to craft these tight thrillers and make you feel like you’re in the throes of an impossible situation. “Trapped” centers on an overnight high school janitor being forced to deal with upper-class seniors trying to orchestrate a dangerous prank. “A Lien” is a more political film with a subject that everyone has an opinion about and has often been a leading headline. Both films feel immediate and tense and are acted to perfection.
As I wrote in my Oscars shorts piece last month, “A Lien” bears some similarity to another short film I wrote about a year ago called “I Have No Tears And I Must Cry,” by Luis Fernando Puente. Both films deal with the stress of being interviewed for a green card by someone who seems intent on making the process more difficult than it needs to be. The films have different approaches, conflicts, and outcomes, but both put us in the room with these people. Their personal lives, dreams, and good, purposeful intentions are on the line as someone–or something–could intervene at any moment and change their trajectories forever. And it’s all in a day’s work for the people with all the power.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Q&A with Sam Cutler-Kreutz
How did this come about?
We stumbled across the marriage entrapment process in 2018 and immediately felt that we had to do something. The idea that this twisting of immigration rules happens right now, in states across the US, massively damaging the lives of families, sparked our desire to advocate against this practice. As filmmakers we feel the most impactful thing we can do is call attention to this insane process and intertwine it with a story that shows the real impact it has.
We strongly believe that art is political in nature. For us it’s about trying to engage with the cultural themes around us, finding ways as directors to soak up the zeitgeist, crystalize it, and give it back to the viewer in a form they can engage with. Oftentimes that comes down to trying to bring large and convoluted themes down to the individual level – looking at the impact on families or single people. Strangely the most hyper specific is often the most universal.
The film has a leanness to it that feels like it has been edited down to its barest essentials. Did you try other versions that were longer and maybe less tight?
I think there is an element of exploration in every writing process, and with this film, we definitely spent time figuring out where to start and end the film. The circular nature of the car-to-car seemed to work well, and once we hit on the idea of bringing the hair braiding back, the whole thing just clicked. Something about Nina’s basic desire to have her hair braided and its reminder about the micro needs of the moment, even as the macro is falling apart around the characters, helped drive home the film’s themes and remind us that immigration is about humans at its core.
There are so many ways this film could have ended, both thematically and stylistically, but you went with the daughter wanting her hair braided by her mother, which can be interpreted many different ways. Was it a struggle to figure out a way to end the film (before the coda)?
We try hard in every film to remove as much fat as possible. Especially when you’re making a short, there’s very little time to waste. We feel that the stripped-down documentary feeling of the film really grounds the viewer in the reality of the situation. As we are editing, we will often enlarge every scene to make them work and then cut down each scene proportionality until the run time of the film seems right.
There is a lot that the actors/characters have to go through in this fifteen-minute short that has to come off very convincingly, and it seems like it’s a delicate process to make it convincing. How did you work with the actors to get them in that space for a short period of time (for a short film production) to pull this off?
For us, it was about giving the actors a sense of their entire lives up until this moment, where they were born, went to high school, who their parents and siblings are, how they met each other, everything from the mundane to the dramatic. We wrote out an entire timeline of each of the characters’ lives, and then the actors fleshed it out more themselves once they got the roles. We spent time together creating family photos and trying to gather all the evidence the government requires for an actual green card marriage interview. There is a myth that short film pre-production and production is also short. We did pre-production for about a year before we shot, which is longer than many features. In the good cheap-fast-triangle, it’s gotta be cheap and good, so for us, it’s never going to be fast.
The audience will rightfully feel angry, frustrated and, perhaps, helpless after watching this. How would you want the viewer to direct those feelings into positive or helpful action?
We hope the film will help push for urgently needed comprehensive immigration reform. Not only do we think the practice of entrapping immigrants at their green card marriage interview is immoral, we think a hard look at the complex bureaucracy and enforcement incentives in our immigration system are desperately needed.
We hope the film will help humanize the green card and immigrant process, while galvanizing Americans to push for a more compassionate and straightforward immigration system.
We’ve partnered with the ACLU—they are an incredible resource both for immigrant families and for Americans looking to get involved.
What’s next for you?
We are working on writing our debut feature, which we hope will be our next project.