Immigration Battle

Shari Robertson grew up in Texas and New Mexico where she trained in anthropology and ethnographic film. She began her career in the Southern Highlands rainforest of Papua New Guinea with the Bosavi people, observing the effects of rapid culture change on a small-scale tribal society. Since then, her work has often examined difficult situations in inaccessible places: young Khmer Rouge guerrillas crossing Cambodian minefields; Indian archaeologists fighting to restore the wondrous ancient temple of Angkor Wat; and the tragi-comic crossroads of domestic politics and the American drug war in Peru. Since the early '90s, Robertson and husband Michael Camerini have worked together from their production company, The Epidavros Project, in New York City. Together they have filmed oilmen in Eastern Java, parliamentarians throughout Africa, coca growers in Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley, and tribal elders in Kankan, Northeast Guinea. In every case, they've worked to understand and translate into film the life experience of a particular group of people for audiences in other places. In 2000, they completed their first US collaboration, an inside look at the American political asylum system which became their groundbreaking feature documentary, Well-Founded Fear (POV, 2000).

Michael Camerini shoots, directs, and produces films and documentary series that traverse geographical and subject areas as diverse as women's rights and social change in India, artists both famous and not yet famous, and the struggle to balance religious and cultural identity with mainstream values in the United States. His approach to filmmaking is notable for a camera technique that is fluid and nonintrusive, and a style of filming that encourages people to tell their own stories, whatever the cultural context. An interest in what it means to be a foreigner is the unifying theme in his work.