There’s already a buzz around this year’s Academy Awards. Not only is there a woman’s name in the boys club category of Best Director (only the fourth time a female director has featured in that list – go Kathryn!).. but there’s a nomination in the Documentary Feature category which is definitely one to watch.
Which Way Home was made by Rebecca Cammisa with help from the organization Women Make Movies. The film follows unaccompanied migrant children as they journey through Mexico to the U.S. on a freight train they call “The Beast”.
The stories range from children like Olga and Freddy, nine-year old Hondurans who are trying to reach their families in Minnesota, to Jose, a ten-year-old El Salvadoran who has been abandoned by smugglers and ends up alone in a Mexican detention center, and focuses on Kevin, a streetwise 14-year-old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach New York and send money back to his family. It was screened on HBO – and will repeated throughout this month.
Women Make Movies is the world’s leading distributor of independent films by and about women. For three years in a row, films from WMM have taken home top prizes at Sundance. In 2009, Rough Aunties by acclaimed filmmaker Kim Longinotto won the World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize; and in 2008 The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo received the Special Jury Prize in Documentary.
For more, visit the WMM website
photo courtesy HBO
