‘La Ciudad’ Sheds Light on a Daily Battle for Survival

From the opening shot of big skies hovering above a New York City landscape, one can imagine the idealized notion of big dreams for building a life in the city below.

Tonight’s “La Ciudad (The City),” presented by PBS and the Independent Television Service and airing on KCET-TV at 9, tells a story of several Latin American immigrants who made their way to New York with the common hope of improving their lives.

This dramatic collection of four vignettes from writer-director David Riker depicts the often overlooked plight of recent immigrants--be they legal or illegal. We are introduced to what for them have become all too familiar existences as itinerant workers, sweatshop garment-makers and homeless street performers. In these often self-contained communities the challenges of getting through the day are omnipresent.

Each of the dramas has a starting point based on a real event or circumstance Riker had witnessed or researched. Day laborers congregate on street corners hoping for a day’s work of breaking bricks in an abandoned lot for 15 cents a brick. Garment workers toil away for abusive supervisors for months on end without pay. Homeless parents struggle to care for their children while being rousted by authorities from place to place. Frustration and demoralization abound when what one aspires to is present but always out of reach.

A strong debut film by Riker, “La Ciudad” strikes a nice balance of stark realism and personal narrative without overt sentimentality. His use of nonactors for the lead roles, as well as the gritty urban look (that seemed more real than designed), calls to mind neo-realist films like Vittorio De Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” (1948).

The lingering emotions this film can evoke are derived not from forced visual manipulations, but from its capacity to touch an empathetic core within individual viewers. Desperation is an undercurrent that flows throughout the four tales as the characters endure being trapped in situations they now must maintain to survive.

Riker could easily have harked back to the founding of America when everyone, save for indigenous people, was an immigrant. Instead he created a piece that takes on the contemporary air of present-day New York City, so the past remains there and the present is realized. The film doesn’t lecture or condescend. It simply reminds and reveals humanity in a day and age of increasing polarization about immigration.

The touchy issue of illegal immigration itself is not the primary discourse of “La Ciudad”; rather, it’s about what happens to many of the immigrants that are already in the United States. How can this disenfranchised group in particular facilitate the problems they encounter with language barriers, health, education and housing? Riker doesn’t have all the answers but in raising the question brings the issues into a more personalized light. In showing the grueling realities of the characters’ everyday lives, one also sees fear, need and lack of knowledge informing the paths those lives take.

Cities are locales that change along with the times. Within New York’s own history, Irish and later Italian immigrants once occupied the same area Latin American immigrants now inhabit. However, in a country built on an immigrant foundation and the pursuit of the American dream, that dream remains a distant glimmer on the horizon for many. Just why that is may be due to a variety of sociological factors. In “La Ciudad,” the mix of those factors with personal stories reveals the strong and hopeful face of the Latin American immigrant of today.

* “La Ciudad (The City)” airs tonight at 9 on KCET-TV.