Starting today, the Otro Mar project will present a film festival that explores the issues surrounding Latino immigration in St. Louis.

“The Crossing Borders Film Festival: Immigrant Perspectives on the American Dream” pairs four documentaries with speakers who are policy experts in the area upon which the film focuses. They will facilitate discussion following the films and participate in question-and-answer sessions with the audience.

The festival will help participants “make an informed decision about how immigration should be handled,” according to junior Chris Olliges, a sociology student involved with the project. “Regardless of your stance on immigration, the debate continues to rage on, both in the legislative and [the] public arena.”

Just last week, thousands gathered in St. Louis’ Kiener Plaza to support immigration reform, echoing protests that have taken place throughout the country in recent weeks. The Senate is scheduled to resume its debate on the legislation Monday.

“At stake is whether the millions of undocumented immigrants will be able to work toward citizenship, and also whether those who provide counseling, healthcare and other services will be arrested for providing aid to undocumented residents,” said Jennifer Greenfield, director of public relations for Otro Mar and student in the social work masters program at SLU.

“Since many of us are students in healthcare and social service professions, the Senate’s decisions next week could directly impact us,” Greenfield said. “As students at a Jesuit university, we are called to understand how social policy affects the most vulnerable in our society.”

One purpose of the Otro Mar Project is to promote social justice through film-the other, to promote media literacy, which Olliges explained as the ability “to critically consume media by understanding that every message you see is carefully constructed for a specific purpose.”

By inviting an expert to speak after each film screening, the audience will be able to take an active role by seeking answers to the questions raised by the films.

“The mission [of the festival] is to raise awareness of socially relevant issues,” said Luis Blanco-Doring, a Jesuit scholastic and graduate student in theology and communication who serves as Otro Mar’s director of project logistics. “Showing these movies . triggers a lot of questions that people can’t answer themselves.”

The speakers will include SLU students, faculty and experts from the community.

Two of the short documentaries that will be shown during the festival were produced by members of the Otro Mar Project. Crossing the Border and Ganandose La Vida: Making a Living were spurred by two years of Walter Carrasco’s ethnographic research, which included interviews with immigrants in various stages of their journey toward citizenship.

Carrasco, one of the founding members of Otro Mar, is majoring in anthropology at SLU, with an emphasis on using documentary films for research and advocacy.

The films were shot on location in Mexico, Texas and St. Louis, and the footage was then developed into documentary films by Otro Mar members, Carrasco said.

“It is our aim to bring into this debate the ‘other’ voice, of the immigrants themselves” into a debate that is dominated by politicians, Carrasco said. “It is easy to fear what you do not know. In coming to hear the human voices and reasons of these fathers, mothers and children, it is our hope to convert them in the eyes of the American public from ‘issues’ or ‘illegals’ to what they are in reality: humans with dignity and the same right to survive . which every person in the world has.”

In conjunction with the presentation of Gan?ndose La Vida on Saturday, the Mexico Solidarity Network will discuss the struggles of the 12 million undocumented workers who reside in the United States-half of whom are Mexican. MSN is a grassroots organization dedicated to instigating social change by challenging existing power structures.

“The network struggles for democracy, economic justice and human rights on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border,” Carrasco said. “The presentation by the Mexico Solidarity Network will provide attendees of the festival with the often-unheard voice of immigration policy from the perspective of the countries which the immigrants come from.”

The Otro Mar Project was created by several SLU students, along with members of the St. Louis community, in 2004. Then, Carrasco, along with Meredith Karazin, put together the “Sleeping Under the Arch Film Festival and Symposium: Issues about Homelessness,” and invited SLU students to produce a film for the festival. The success of “This is the Blues Man’s Home,” the film produced with SLU students, inspired Carrasco and Karazin to form the Otro Mar Project.

Karazin is a graduate of Washington University who works with a nonprofit organization in St. Louis.

“The goal [of the project is] to give SLU students the opportunity to collaborate with others outside the SLU campus on social justice projects,” Greenfield said.

The festival will take place in Carlo Auditorium in Tegeler Hall, Thursday through Saturday, April 20-22.

The event is free to all, but attendees are free to make donations to the project. It is hosted by the Doerr Center for Social Justice Education and Research at SLU.

“It is incumbent on us, as students and citizens of the world, to consider all the issues at stake in this debate, and to make informed decisions about our stance on immigration in the United States,” Greenfield said.

The Crossing Borders Film Festival: Immigrant Perspectives on the American Dream

Thursday, April 20, 6:30-8:30 p.m.: Just Enough? The Economics behind Immigration

Film: Life and Debt, addresses the economic plight of Jamaica

Speaker: Economist and Latin America Expert

Friday, April 21, 6:30-8:30 p.m.: Crossing Borders, Passing Bills

Films: Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border, a short documentary on the Minuteman Project, and Crossing the Border (Otro Mar film), where immigrants share their thoughts right before they cross the U.S.-Mexico border

Speaker: Legislative and Immigration Expert

Saturday, April 22, 5-7 p.m.: Immigrant Rights with the Mexico Solidarity Network

Film: Gan?ndose la Vida: Making a Living (Otro Mar film), where immigrant workers in the United States discuss their experiences

Speakers: The Mexico Solidarity Network

Saturday, April 22, 7:30-9:30 p.m.: Screening of Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary, a film that follows the stories of Central Americans who enter the U.S. illegally