Alex Mousan

I come from immigrants. My family's genes stretch the globe from Europe to the Middle East, Central to North America. I am creating a film to honor the migrational pattern my family took and to tell the story of how I was able to be born in the United States. This film will track the path my Jewish grandmother took as she was forced to flee Europe and the Middle East in World War II and my Nicaraguan mother and aunt who were forced to flee their native Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution.  I will use my own family's story to tell the story of countless immigrants forced to leave their lives in search of a safer and more prosperous one. This tale will be told as fragmented memories from the perspective of my aunt and mother, the story keepers of my family. 

I will start the film with a short animation of an explosion, giving the exposition and background of World War II through archival footage. It will begin telling the story of the migration of jewish people across the Atlantic from Europe to Central America. This will then go into the exposition of the 1980’s that will talk about my mothers migration from Nicaragua to the United States. The story will be told not linearly but through stories, poems, moments that are fragmented and maybe not so true but legends that have been passed down through the generations. I call the piece a visual anthology because I believe the stories, however fantastical, make and mark the reality I now live in. I will the unreliable and gullible narrator taking the stories in and allowing them to be factual for the sake of the story. I believe in letting a legend live on because what harm can be done? 

This story is important because I haven’t seen anything like it. I work as a journalist and storyteller and I tell the stories of immigrants and refugees all the time but the harsh realities a lot of migrants face is that they can’t go back and trace every single moment of their journey because of their safety. I want to take the narrative of the immigrant and make it a comical moment of yes fear but also humor in the absurdity of it all. Getting to ask the question, how did we survive with a chuckle instead of tears? How did the circumstances and sacrifices generations made before me to be able to make my way to pursuing a masters degree and buying $7 lattes because I have the disposable income to. This story is relevant as I begin to encounter what it means to be mixed race and a minority in a country that is just beginning to reconcile the wrongdoings of how it was founded. I think it is relevant to every mixed race, ethnicity and identity that are not able to fully trace their families heritage and generation back because there isn’t enough documentation for certain racial minorities. I am part of the generation that will get to rewrite history and change the narrative as so many white members of society have done before me.