- Title: Director of 'Soy Nero' feels responsibility to talk about 'Green Card' soldiers
- Date: 19th February 2016
- Summary: BERLIN, GERMANY (FEBRUARY 17, 2016) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR, RAFI PITTS, SAYING: "I find that the simple phrase of rejection is now what everybody seems to be obsessed with. Because rejection is giving them votes. When they don't reject, you know, they go down in the polls. What is that about, you know? And I kept talking about [German Chancellor] Angela M
- Embargoed: 5th March 2016 12:30
- Keywords: Berlinale film festival Berlin Soy Nero Rafi Pitts Johhny Ortiz Green Card Military
- Location: BERLIN, GERMANY / VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- City: BERLIN, GERMANY / VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- Country: Germany
- Topics: Film
- Reuters ID: LVA006455OBBH
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE RESENDING WITH FULL SCRIPT. CONTAINS PROFANE LANGUAGE IN FILM CLIPS
Foreign-born "Green Card" soldiers have been serving in the United States military since the Vietnam War, but the plight of deported veterans has not been explored on film until "Soy Nero" (I Am Nero), director Rafi Pitts said.
Speaking in an interview to Reuters on Wednesday (February 17), the filmmaker said he felt the responsibility to talk about Green Card soldiers because nobody wanted to do it.
The program provides a path to full citizenship for people holding "Green Card" residency permits who enlist in the military.
But Pitts's movie, which was shown on Tuesday as it competes for the Berlin film festival's main Golden Bear prize, says that although the program works for many, some 3,000 foreign-born veterans were deported for one reason or another.
This gives rise to an almost surreal scene in the movie showing the graveside funeral for a soldier who died in service in the U.S. military being buried across the border in Mexico.
"Now all that I would like is for everybody to know that this kind of thing exists and as absurd as that is in a country that's a democratic country, that everybody looks up to, which is America, there is this absurdity over there," Pitts, who is of mixed Iranian-British heritage, told Reuters.
The filmmaker also spoke on the refugee crisis in Europe and that simple ways of thinking one could resolve immigration would be very dangerous.
"We are serving the extremes like this, you know? People far out in the Middle East, they know they can't invade Europe. In their mind they would like Europe to disintegrate from within. And right now, all over the place, everybody's playing into that. And it doesn't take [Anatoly] Karpov, the chess player, to see that," he said.
In the film Johnny Ortiz, of TV's "American Crime", plays Nero, a young man of Mexican heritage who grew up in southern California but was deported as an illegal immigrant.
Desperate to get back to America, which for him is home, he crosses the border illegally and takes advantage of the "Green Card" soldier program to get citizenship.
He winds up in a desert war zone in the Middle East where his small patrol manning a remote checkpoint comes under attack. Without giving away the ending, the upshot is that it looks unlikely that Ortiz's character will become a citizen after all.
"[T]he story was so real. What's happening…At the end of the film is a film but it's all about the Green Card soldiers, you know, it's what happened to them. Daniel Torres was the advisor, the military advisor for this film. He served the United States for four years, he was about to become a captain and the United States said: 'Sorry, you're not a citizen', you gotta go back. And that for me is crazy. I said you fought for United States and picked up a gun, or you lived there your whole life you deserve to represent that, no matter what the heck people say," Ortiz said.
The film is one of 19 vying for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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