9500 Liberty

A leap forward in documentary...
In 1988 (barely a generation ago) Errol Morris forever changed documentary films with his seminal work The Thin Blue Line. The film broke the rules: it included re-enactments, opinions, and alternate scenarios and, in so doing, broke the documentary's equivalent of the fourth wall--in this case, the wall between the story and the storyteller.

From that point forward the definitions further blurred. Documentaries took up residence in a gray area that had leapt beyond the boundaried objectives of their prior world. A year after Morris' effort came Michael Moore's Roger and Me, a film in which the documentarian's opinions were broadly front and center. From there it wouldn't be much longer before the documentarian became the subject, ushering in the experiential documentary most famously exhibited by Morgan Spurlock in his justifiably notable work, Super Size Me.

With the 2009 release of 9500 Liberty, a disturbing yet ultimately uplifting film by Eric Byler and...

A timely saga
I lived in Prince William County when it was Ground Zero for immigration wars. (Ground Zero was the term Sen. Warner used to describe it.) The film is somewhat shocking at first viewing, because of the hate-filled hysteria that erupted over the issue of immigration, which led to an equally shocking edict from the Board of Supervisors that required police to demand documents from 'suspected' undocumented immigrants. The filmmakers artfully countered the brutality by posting their film footage online, of both the haters and people of reason, and gradually conflict resolution won the day, if not the war.
I think the film is a work of art and allows you to feel the moral issues before us today. Because immigration is still such a timely issue I have bought many copies to distribute to churches for viewing and discussion.

like in Arizona, profiling divided a community
I liked this because it showed how ugly motives cost the people and businesses involved. The businesses may never recover. This documentary showed how everyone lost, there were no winners.

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