February 15, 2007

SONYA FATAH

Padre Nuestro was almost the last film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City this year. There wasn’t much publicity around it. Its director, Christopher Zalla ‘97, and producer, Ben Odell, hoped the film, an entry in the competition’s dramatic competition category, would speak for itself. Even so, when the Sundance awards were announced and Padre Nuestro bagged the festival’s top honor, the grand-jury prize for the best drama, it was hard to believe.

“Oh my God, this is not actually happening,” were the first words that came to Zalla as he accepted the award for his debut film, dedicating it New York City’s countless undocumented workers.

“It was pretty thrilling,” he says. “I’d never actually won anything like this before so I was pretty floored … even several days later, I have to pinch myself.”

Padre Nuestro, a Spanish-language drama that tells the story of Pedro, a young Mexican who leaves home with a locket and a letter from his deceased mother, takes a punishing truck ride across the border with a host of ”illegal” Mexicans and arrives in New York, desperate to find his father. But once there he loses his identity to a friend and encounters the real-life battles of undocumented workers in New York.

“It’s a film about New Yorkers, to us, more than anything,” said Zalla while accepting his award. “It’s a city of outsiders … Even if you’re from Iowa, you’re an immigrant to New York.”

Film came naturally to Zalla, who was born in Kenya and has lived in Africa, Europe, and South America, attended 13 different schools and shifted home on 21 occasions. “When you’re an outsider in a foreign land, you often can’t rely on language for communication,” Zalla told indieWIRE.com. “Many thoughts are internalized and moments of interaction get reduced to their visual essence.”

Zalla graduated from Columbia University’s School of the Arts film program, but he started exploring the film medium at Oberlin. There wasn’t much curricular support for filmmaking at the time, so Zalla went about garnering more resources for its development. He found that support in Oberlin’s president, Nancy Dye. It’s not something Zalla will forget. “How often can a student at a college schedule a meeting with the President about something as crazy as raising funds for filmmaking–and actually find that kind of support?”

The collaboration between Dye and Zalla led to a film co-op with a $22,000 budget in Zalla’s senior year. The co-op purchased used cameras, other equipment, and 8MM and 16MM film. Within a semester, 100 members had signed up, a regular attendance of 30 were at the weekly meetings, and three bigger films were under production. And the art department sponsored a private reading–taught by Zalla–to introduce students to 16MM films.

Dye also introduced him to acclaimed television director [Friends, Will & Grace]Jim Burrows ’62 when Burrows was visiting Oberlin. “He took an interest in me, supported the film initiative, and invited me to L.A. to observe him in action. It probably didn’t seem like much to him, but to a kid who was just starting out in this crazy business, those little votes of confidence and advice were like manna to me.”

Then there was Zalla’s friend and housemate at Oberlin, Ed Helms ‘96, now a correspondent on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Helms had completed a semester at NYU’s film school and returned to Oberlin with the film bug. “[He] came back with all of this incredible knowledge. I volunteered to assist him in anyway I could, on any of his projects, and he was so great to have me along.”

Zalla who has lived in New York City for a decade drew his inspiration for Padre Nuestro after witnessing the collective community values of New Yorkers. “… I could now see how deeply fundamental our desire for community was,” he told indieWIRE. “We have put up all of these boundaries, these borders between each other, but ironically we’re all looking for some sense of connection, of family. On its deepest level, that’s what Padre Nuestro is about: the search for family.”

Indeed, the film has been a labor of love. And while the story is told against the backdrop of life for undocumented workers in New York, Zalla resists “overt politics in cinema” and is passionate about telling stories that have a life of their own. “If we’ve done anything political in this film, it’s been to give people who’ve been reduced to labels like illegal, or immigrants a human face–to portray them as real, complicated (even flawed) individuals.”