Immigrant Dreams: The Enduring Power of David Riker’s “La Ciudad”

It was the film that should not have been made.

When La Ciudad opened at the Quad Cinema in downtown Manhattan on October 22, 1999, there were 8 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, most of them from Latin America. These were the people who inspired director David Riker to make his film, who taught him Spanish, who overcame their fears that his acting auditions were an elaborate trap by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and who ultimately starred in his movie.

In Hollywood and at New York University’s film school, where Riker was a student at the time, people had told him that no one would want to see a movie shot in Spanish without a single professional actor. But his film of real immigrants dramatizing their stories in their native language — the sweatshop on the silver screen — sold out show after show, prompting the Quad to extend La Ciudad’s run from one week to three months. So many immigrants arrived with their entire families that the theater waived its policy of refusing admittance to children under 10.

Critics were similarly ecstatic. For a while, it seemed like nobody could write about La Ciudad (The City) without referring to Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, or Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan. It screened at film festivals and art houses, and came home with armfuls of awards. Politically, Riker’s timing could not have been better. In the early 2000s, Americans were finally accepting the idea that undocumented immigrants might deserve basic rights. Presidential candidate George W. Bush promised to give them legal status, and as president in July 2001, he gave a speech at Ellis Island that suggested he was poised for action. The following month, Senators Dick Durbin and Orrin Hatch proposed the DREAM Act, which would have granted citizenship to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States before they turned 16. (It didn’t pass, however.)

Next came 9/11. Although the terrorists had no connection to Latin America, the attacks provided the perfect cover for dismantling the progress made by undocumented Latinos and their supporters. In 2003, the INS was swallowed up by the Department of Homeland Security; every foreign-born person now looked like a threat. In the years since, deportations have soared upwards of 300,000 annually; long-term incarceration of mothers and children awaiting immigration trials has become routine; several more versions of the DREAM Act have failed; and Congress has authorized the construction of 700 miles of fresh fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border, an endeavor projected to cost some $6 billion (never mind that most undocumented immigrants enter the U.S. by plane).

Meanwhile La Ciudad’s images of immigrants struggling to find security and happiness fell out of circulation. The only way to view the film was to find an out-of-print DVD from a friend or library. “The decision to remaster the film [for digital platforms] came from a frightening epiphany that the film was simply going to disappear,” Riker told me. “Nobody was going to do it if I didn’t do it.” He found support from the Princess Grace Foundation, the Sundance Collection at UCLA and the Cinema Conservancy, but still fell some $14,000 short. So he turned to Kickstarter. His funding drive began on October 22, 2014, the night of a 15th anniversary screening of La Ciudad at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. Within 10 days he had the cash.

This week, the remastered film is being released on Netflix. On Monday, I streamed it in my living room and found myself startled. Shouldn’t its scenes of labor abuse, educational discrimination and broken families be evocations of the past? The depressing fact is that La Ciudad is as relevant today as it was 16 years ago because, for undocumented immigrants in the United States, almost nothing has changed. They still live under a kind of informal apartheid, enduring the most miserable conditions without complaint, for fear of deportation.