2023 Emerging Artists Showcase
Esperanza
Sunday, March 12th, 2023
Denver Sie FilmCenter
Synopsis of Film:
When an immigrant taxi driver in upstate New York takes a hopeful young couple to the Canadian border, they find themselves at odds in the shared pursuit of a better life.
Dev, a taxi driver in upstate New York, ferries asylum-seekers to an unmarked Canadian border crossing in the hopes of earning enough to bring his family over from India. One night, he picks up Estrella and Marisol, a Salvadoran couple with dreams of a new beginning and a great deal at stake. When they challenge his tactics, he must confront how far he will go for his American Dream.
When an immigrant taxi driver in upstate New York takes a hopeful young couple to the Canadian border, they find themselves at odds in the shared pursuit of a better life.
Dev, a taxi driver in upstate New York, ferries asylum-seekers to an unmarked Canadian border crossing in the hopes of earning enough to bring his family over from India. One night, he picks up Estrella and Marisol, a Salvadoran couple with dreams of a new beginning and a great deal at stake. When they challenge his tactics, he must confront how far he will go for his American Dream.
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Shruti Parekh is a filmmaker and journalist from Atlanta and Brooklyn who tells intimate stories of life on the margins of American society. Her work spans fiction, documentary, journalism, animation, and music videos and can be seen in outlets such as Jezebel, Remezcla, Gizmodo, Food & Wine, and NYLON. Her first short film, "Blood Moon," won the Audience Award at the South Asian Film Festival of America. Shruti is the recipient of the Jack Nicholson Distinguished Student Director Award and the Edie and Lew Wasserman Production Fellowship, and is a member of the Snarky Elephant Production Incubator's inaugural 2023 cohort. She has a BA from Brown University and an MFA in Directing from UCLA. |
Director's Statement
As the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants, I have always been interested in exploring the experiences of immigrants and their cross-border journeys to survive and thrive. Immigrant stories reflect the extent of human resilience, determination, and hope. But in xenophobic societies, even kindred communities are often pitted against one another in their struggles for success and self-preservation. In Esperanza, I explore these tensions in the immigrant narrative while questioning the cutthroat nature of the elusive American Dream. While fictional, Esperanza is inspired by a real surge of asylum-seekers crossing into Canada at an unmarked border in upstate New York. I covered this story as a journalist in 2017 and was struck by this alternate border narrative—one in which people flee the U.S. instead of coming to it. Many making the journey are undocumented or at risk of losing their immigration status, and like Estrella and Marisol, many face dangerous futures in their home countries due to their identity. Near the border, taxi drivers who shuttle migrants to their destination sometime follow U.S. border protocol at their passengers’ expense. Some of the drivers are immigrants themselves. Through the stories of Dev, Estrella, and Marisol, I explore the complex dynamics at play between those in pursuit of a better life and the systems they are up against.
| Esperanza Press Kit |