Guest post by writer/director Zeina Durra of “The Imperialists Are Still Alive!” which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and has it’s East Coast Festival premiere today at the Woodstock Film Festival. (Ted’s Disclaimer: My wife Vanessa produced The Imperialists Are Still Alive! and all personal bias aside, it is a film I very much both enjoy and admire.)
My experience in Salt Lake City airport pretty much sums it all up. The Homeland Security Immigration Officer asked me why I was coming to Utah. I told him I had a film at Sundance. He then asked me what it was called, I paused for a moment thinking that if I told him the title of my film he might not let me in — but then my mind fast forwarded to an interrogation room scenario where they looked up the Sundance website and would see my name attached to a project called The Imperialists are Still Alive! So, I just said it, “The Imperialists Are Still Alive!” and he said, “Sounds great, I’d love to see it”. Did I detect a secret amused smile or was he just generally a happy guy? we’ll never know and I walked off into the minus 20 landscape.
Even a Tagline ( a tagline is something that I have a disproportionate dislike for) would come in handy at US immigration. It’s sole purpose would be to answer the question, “What’s your film about?” with pure ease and perhaps if there was a hook one would sell a few future tickets to the Homeland Security team. This is also a tough question to ask just before one is obliged to put one’s hand on a filthy screen that takes your fingerprints. This is partly because it’s stressful to have to recount your film in a border situation and because if I don’t give them an answer or they don’t like my answer there’s always the chance that I may be shipped back to a country which I didn’t come from in the first place.
