Documentary: Carlos, dreamer like 2.5 million Americans

It is an existence in the shadows, without contrasts, without anything sticking out so as not to be noticed, arrested, expelled. It is the life of Carlos, an American for three decades on all levels, except on paper, that the Swiss director duo Stéphanie Barbey and Luc Peter have magnificently highlighted in their third documentary, “Dreamers”. released this week in French-speaking cinemas.

Dreamers, like the nickname given to undocumented immigrants who arrived as children in the United States since the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) bill aimed at regularizing them, filed in 2001 and still awaiting adoption by Congress. Minors, they are currently considered not responsible for their arrival on the territory and therefore protected. As adults, their reality shifts into clandestinity: their presence becomes illegal and they risk deportation.

A youth in Chicago

Arriving in Chicago at age 9, with his parents and three brothers – Jorge, Jesus and youngest Julio – Carlos was 39 during filming. In his youth, he had to give up a university scholarship due to lack of legal status. Since living in hiding, he has worked in construction. He climbed the ranks, becoming a foreman on major construction sites in a country that doesn’t want him, while accepting his taxes. Very committed to the cause of dreamershe chose to take the risk of revealing his experience on the big screen.

Because through Carlos, it is the story of 2.5 million dreamers that the feature film by Genevan Stéphanie Barbey and Lausannois Luc Peter is about. “We wanted to answer the question: what makes a citizen? confides the second. We met Carlos in 2015. Everything about him, his mentality, his philosophy of life, is American. His story touched us very strongly.”

Make people feel

The film opens with Carlos, first from behind, an anonymous silhouette walking in a metropolis which often seems to overwhelm him with its size in the beauty of the shots by Nikolai von Graevenitz and carried by the music of Louis Jucker. “We didn’t want to show, but rather to make people feel,” explains Luc Peter. Nikolai therefore played a lot with blurring, close-ups, reflections so that the image was a little floating, as if on an inner journey.

This journey takes us to meet the members of a very close-knit family. Jorge’s absence weighs on the story: he was deported to Mexico. If he sets foot in the United States, where his son Freddy also lives, he risks 30 years in prison. Anguished at the idea of ​​experiencing the same fate as his brother, Jesus almost never goes out. As for Julio, he was naturalized following his marriage to an American woman. “But marriage does not automatically provide access to citizenship. It’s a matter of quotas and the decision can take ten years, explains Stéphanie Barbey. But getting married is risky for an illegal alien, because he has to come out of the woods to do it.”

In black and white for more reality

Carlos’ voice leads the film. Its monotonous tone echoes this fragile and monotonous daily life, suspended at the chance of an identity check and transcribed in black and white on the screen. “It’s our most constructed film,” says the director who wrote the voice-over based on Carlos’ testimonies. In cinema, what interests us, Luc and I, is the gray zone between documentary and fiction, it is to sublimate, to intensify reality. We like documentaries because we start from a true story and make it cinematic, instead of starting from fiction and trying to make it realistic.”

With the choice of black and white, the duo also wanted to “free themselves from the temporality that color can give”. A way of reminding us that administrations succeed one another without resolving the question of dreamers. The Swiss exit was also postponed in order to reflect American news: on November 5, Donald Trump could be re-elected. “In 2012, Barack Obama established the DACA program, inviting dreamers to register in the hope of obtaining a residence permit that is renewable every two years, specifies Luc Peter. As soon as he was elected, in 2016, Donald Trump stopped the program and there were arrests.

Started in this tense atmosphere, filming was then interrupted because of Covid: “We resumed under Joe Biden. His election brought a little serenity, underlines Stéphanie Barbey. We chose to talk about dreamers, because the United States is the land of immigration par excellence. But the story could be played out in Switzerland or anywhere in the West.”

Heading for Alaska

Twenty years ago, Stéphanie Barbey and Luc Peter met in an actor directing course. Since then, they have worked together regularly, with three films together: “Magic Radio” (2007), “Broken Land” (2014) and “Dreamers”. The director of Intermezzo Films takes care of the production, sometimes the camera, while the filmmaker focuses more on the writing.

And when Stéphanie Barbey launches with a first solo documentary, “Totemic”, Luc Peter is not far away: he produces it. Currently filming in Alaska, the film follows in the footsteps of Georges Barbey, his explorer great-grandfather, through the story of two Tsimshian totems, which he purchased in 1956 on behalf of the Geneva Museum of Ethnography .

Setting out in search of their meaning, she met the descendants of the sculptors, themselves in search of their roots: “They came to Geneva to visit the museum’s exhibition on the decolonization of art. I also filmed their discovery of the original totems, kept in boxes. It was very moving because they see them as people, not objects.”

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