Border crossing

IN the land of “American Idol” and YouTube, the era of Citizen Cinema is upon us. In one of those remarkable defining moments that exemplify the grass-roots nature of today’s pop culture, the most compelling film about the immigration reform debate that’s raging across the country today has come from a 63-year-old former schoolteacher living outside a tiny border town in southern Arizona.

With millions of immigrants marching in the streets and Congress squabbling over border security legislation, the tussle over illegal immigration has reached something of a fever pitch in America. But so far mainstream Hollywood has been silent on the subject, its portrayals of immigrants (with the exception of a great sequence with an enraged Sikh in the crime thriller “Inside Man”) largely limited to cheap stereotyped laughs.

So Mercedes Maharis must have been crazy to think she could have an effect on an issue that has divided families and businesses as well as the entire Republican Party. After all, she was living in rural Cochise County, two miles north of the Mexican border, where she and her husband had moved in 2003, hoping to enjoy the open vistas and clean air. Only after they bought a home there did Maharis discover that about 100 feet from her new house was a smuggling trail used by hundreds of illegal immigrants to make nightly border crossings.

One evening she was jolted awake by the roar of a helicopter overhead, the wash from its blades rattling her windows as it chased a group of people toward a trio of nearby Border Patrol trucks. Maharis grabbed her video camera, ran outside in her nightgown and recorded the drama from her driveway. “It scared the daylights out of me,” she told me. “With the helicopters flying by every night, it feels like you’re living in a war zone. I thought, ‘I have to film this, because otherwise no one is going to believe it.’ ”

Armed with an affordable video camera and a compelling idea, an angry homeowner can be transformed overnight into a documentary filmmaker.

Though it has never received a theatrical release, Maharis’ film, “Cochise County, USA: Cries From the Border,” has found a growing audience on the home-video front, having already sold close to 20,000 copies, an impressive tally for a documentary by an unknown filmmaker.

Distributed by Genius Products, the film has been touted by a growing number of conservative websites, talk radio hosts and the Wall Street Journal, which recently ran an op-ed piece offering a classic red-state endorsement, saying the film had “the wrong politics for Hollywood,” adding that screenings of the film had been poorly attended “in the salons of Cambridge and San Francisco.”

It’s easy to see why conservatives have embraced the film. While Maharis does interview a few immigrants looking for work -- she’s fluent in Spanish -- a healthy chunk of the movie is devoted to complaints from unhappy Cochise County locals, decrying car thefts, drug smuggling and property damage as well as the devastating toll that the influx of border-crossers has had on the local healthcare system. The film hardly mentions the benefits of having goods and services provided by cheap immigrant labor.

While the film is not especially sophisticated, Maharis, like Michael Moore, has an uncanny ability to capture both incendiary images and real human emotion. The movie opens with a striking sequence of a seemingly endless stream of people illegally ducking under a barbed-wire fence, crossing the border as we hear the famous Emma Lazarus poem that adorns the Statue of Liberty.

What’s especially startling about the film is that its filmmaker doesn’t fit any of our neat cultural preconceptions. To put it bluntly, Maharis is no liberal-baiting Ann Coulter. She spent much of her life in Santa Monica, where she worked as a volunteer in a homeless shelter, studied meditation, worked in interior design and ran a video firm that produced educational films. She has a master of arts in Latin American studies and has been a longtime advocate of prisoners’ rights.

A political independent, she views the film as a nonpartisan educational tool. “As a teacher, I felt responsible for leaving a record of all this for sociology and law classes. It’s like I told our sheriff: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Maybe if people see the bodies of people who’ve died trying to cross the border, maybe they’ll be inspired to take some action.”

Her pictures have stirred emotions at almost every turn. When she screened the film for Gerald Kicanas, the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, she says he became “very distressed” over what he felt was the film’s lack of empathy for the immigrants. “He said, ‘Stop this. I have to go.’ And he left 20 minutes into the film.”

On the other hand, when Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), a staunch advocate of border protection, saw the film, he refused to sponsor a screening in Washington because the film had interviews, Maharis says, with illegal immigrants and “an ACLU propagandist.”

Maharis’ big break came when producer Christopher Bannon heard her on a talk radio station in Tucson. Bannon tipped off his brother, Stephen Bannon, an ex-Goldman Sachs investment banker who heads Genius Products, a hot independent home-video distributor that has partnered with Harvey and Bob Weinstein to handle the Weinstein Co.’s home-video releases. Bannon, who has directed a film himself -- a 2004 documentary about President Reagan’s battle against communism -- sensed that Maharis was the perfect spokeswoman for such explosive material.

“If you called central casting and asked for someone from Middle America, with all the American characteristics of fairness and compassion, you’d get Mercedes,” he says. “She wasn’t someone from Greenwich Village flying in to do a movie. She’s a real person from a very specific place who’s telling a very personal story.”

Bannon helped Maharis tighten up the film’s dramatic arc but left much of its raw footage alone. “Its power comes from it being real cinema verite,” he says. “It reminded me of when I first saw ‘Harlan County USA,’ which shows how a region can be destroyed by forces beyond its control. For me, the film’s ‘ah-ha’ moment is seeing that those illegal immigrants coming over the barbed wire are not the bad guys. Immigration is in the DNA of our country. It’s what we represent.”

Although Bannon is a true-blue conservative, he’s in business with the Weinsteins, who are ardent liberals, and his company distributed the video of the John F. Kerry documentary “Going Up River.” He has little time for what he calls the “conservative victimology” view of Hollywood. “I see a lot of films from young conservatives, and they just don’t have the filmmaking chops yet,” he says.

“That’s not to say that if you walked into a studio with Sen. James Inhofe’s lecture on global warming being a hoax, which is just as compelling as Al Gore’s, I mean, you’d get laughed out of every meeting in town. But the system out here is very Darwinian. The conservative stuff I see just isn’t very commercial. If it was, someone would do it.”

What Bannon does see in today’s movie world is how the arrival of new video technology has dramatically leveled the playing field in film. In this new bottom-up culture, amateur filmmakers are our new auteurs. One of the most talked-about films at the recent Tribeca Film Festival was “The War Tapes,” an Iraq war documentary whose footage was shot by soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard.

“It’s almost like Paris in the ‘20s,” says Bannon. “All you need to make a film is a credit card and a compelling idea. Whether it’s Iraq or Darfur or Cochise County, the real world is just a lot more compelling than most Hollywood films.”

Citizen Cinema also has a different style, one closer to the first-person intimacy of Web blogs than the blandness of most mainstream films or mass media. (Maharis reads the Lazarus poem herself and even sings some of the music heard in the film.)

“Cochise County, USA” doesn’t smother its subject with carefully modulated objectivity, the way the immigration debate is often portrayed on network news or -- ahem -- in most newspapers. In an era when the bloody war in Iraq has largely been sanitized before it arrives in our living room -- we often don’t even get to see the flag-draped coffins -- Maharis makes a point of including graphic footage of the bloated bodies of immigrants who have died trying to cross the border.

Every time Maharis screens her film, passions run high. When she showed the movie at a library in the town of Bisbee, Ariz., the place was packed with both anti-immigration ranchers and open-border advocates. Afterward, all hell broke loose. “Everyone started yelling and arguing, and the poor librarian couldn’t stop them,” Maharis recalls. “It felt good -- maybe I was getting people riled up enough to act.”

When I tell Maharis that she sounds like an idealist, she takes it as a compliment.

“That’s what picking up this video camera has done -- even an ordinary person can plant the seeds for responsible social change. It’s a way for all of us to help end suffering.” She laughs. “Now, don’t I sound like I’m from Santa Monica or what!”

“The Big Picture” appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Questions or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.