Independent Lens
Breaking the News
A group of women and LGBTQ+ journalists, bucking the white male status quo, launch The 19th*—a digital news startup that asks who has been omitted from mainstream coverage and how they can be included.
Letters from the Other Side
Through the personal stories of several Mexican women and the cross-border video letters between them, their loved ones, and strangers, Letters from the Other Side reveals the other side of the immigration story.
- Series
- PBS Plus Presentation
- Premiere Date
- October 1, 2006
- Length
- 60 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Open Call
Producer
Heather Courtney
Heather Courtney is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, and a Guggenheim, Sundance, and Fulbright fellow. Her film Where Soldiers Come From (POV) was funded by ITVS, and won an Emmy and an Independent Spirit Award. Other films include The Unafraid (America ReFramed), and the IDA and SXSW Award-winning Los Trabajadores (Indie Lens).
- Other ITVS Films
- Breaking the News
- Los Trabajadores/The Workers
- Where Soldiers Come From
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Learn more about funding opportunities with ITVS.
The Film
"How many more deaths does it take for the U.S. government to do something? Let it be on their conscience that since our tragedy many more have died and many more will die!"
So says Laura in a video letter to the U.S. government, speaking about her husband who died trying to cross the U.S./Mexico border to search for work. Letters from the Other Side interweaves video letters carried across the U.S./Mexico border with the intimate stories of women left behind in post-NAFTA Mexico. By focusing on a side of the immigration story rarely told by the media or touched upon in our national debate, Letters paints a complex portrait of families torn apart by economics, communities dying at the hands of globalization, and governments incapable or unwilling to do anything about it.
