MIDDLEBURY — The Vermont Folklife Center will show “Los Que Se Quedan” (“Those Who Remain”) on Thursday, Oct. 18, at 7 p.m. The documentary film by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman focuses on families left behind in Mexico by migrants to the United States.
Most films tend to emphasize the treacherous journey that so many Mexicans and Central Americans make across the border to the United States, or what life is like once they get there. The homes and families that those migrants come from are usually just a jumping-off point for filmmakers, but Rulfo and Hagerman chose to stay at the point of departure to see how those who remain deal with their reduced numbers.
“It’s like the story of Ulysses, and we wanted to make the Penelope story, about the people who stay behind and wait,” Hagerman said in a recent interview. The directors spent 11 months with more than a dozen Mexican families, living in their homes, observing their lives and getting a sense of their realities.
“Those Who Remain” is a sweet, if painful, reminder to the millions of migrants living in the U.S. of what they left behind. But it also has the potential to inform audiences about what drives the millions of migrants north in the first place
The film won’t just speak to Mexican migrants living in the United States, but to any family, from anywhere in the world, split by migration.
“Those Who Remain” is being shown in conjunction with an exhibit of paintings by Mexican farmworker “El Emigrante” at the Vermont Folklife Center’s new sales gallery through Dec. 22.
For more information about the film or the exhibit visit the Vermont Folklife Center’s website at www.vermontfolklifecenter.org or call (802) 388-4964.