We are experiencing no shortage of discussion, art, or entertainment about immigrants and their experience in America, but the new documentary I’m Leaving Now, directed by Lindsey Cordero and Armando Croda, trains our focus on an underexposed slice of the dynamic: the urge to return home.
The filmmakers, based in New York, hone in on Felipe Hernandez, a lonely but feverishly busy middle-aged Mexican who, after living in Brooklyn for sixteen years, decides he wants to return to the family he left behind long ago.
We see his determination to return renewed, after past efforts have failed, as the exigencies of money and his need to send earnings home kneecap his efforts and hyperextend his residency indefinitely. Flaunting a huge tourist-mariachi sombrero, Felipe is never not working. When he’s not collecting returnable bottles and cans (the film begins with the camera strapped to his cart at night, a kind of recycle cam) or cashing in scrap metal, he’s the janitor for an Orthodox synagogue as well as an all-purpose helpmate at a Mexican deli.
Felipe's life feels like a stripped-down version of most everyone's in a capitalist society—on hold while he earns enough money to live it.
His life feels like a stripped-down version of most everyone's in a capitalist society—on hold while he earns enough money to live it. Felipe’s down moments are largely spent in agonized phone calls with his family, particularly with the youngest son, whom he hasn’t seen since the boy was an infant. His proposed and endlessly postponed trip home is a family reconstitution project he knows is doomed to failure.
Watching I’m Leaving Now (which includes, as you’d hope it would, a mood-leavening Mexican rendition of The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go”), you have to periodically shake off its intimacy and remind yourself of the ubiquity of Felipe’s reality. His static-temp workhorse existence is an integral part of the American fabric, and there are virtually no populated places where you don’t find droves of Felipes, shoveling coal into the furnace of the national economy.
The film reminds us of the portion of the equation so often ignored: the remittances that Felipe and the Latin and Caribbean millions like him send home, in a breathtaking mass act of sacrifice, to the tune of more than $70 billion a year. (Some 40 percent of that goes to Mexican families.) The average annual layout is between four and five thousand dollars a year, which is about half of Mexico’s average annual family income.
Multiply Felipe by a 100 million, and you have a portrait of a substantial swath of modern humankind, living a contingent existence away from their own families, so that those families, living in nations often wrecked by neoliberalism and postcolonialism, can survive. In Felipe’s paradigmatic case, his life in New York has been sustained by a righteous sense of support and duty, which takes a decisive hit when he learns that all of the money he’d sent is gone, and that one of his sons has lost the family’s food stall to a loan shark.
A stout, tireless, charismatic salt-and-pepper dynamo, Felipe often seems as much a man of the moment as one haunted by responsibilities, and Cordero and Croda’s film subtly turns a corner when he pursues (on camera!) a wary Mexican-Indian woman for romance. (An earlier interlude with a prostitute doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Felipe’s clan back at home will appreciate.) When he starts saying adios to people he knows, they tell him they’ve heard that before, and when he begins to plant a garden, you wonder if he will, in fact, ever get home.
As is the fashion in documentaries, ‘I’m Leaving Now’ takes brazen liberties with the idea of cinema-verite documentary.
As is the fashion in documentaries, I’m Leaving Now takes brazen liberties with the idea of cinema-verite documentary. Many sequences are clearly performed for the camera, placing Felipe in situations instead of following him, and often dipping into lyrical passages and studied compositions meant to underline the man’s in-between-ness.
But perhaps our view of the genre must change. “Genuine-ness” is not the be-all for docs that it used to be. Before the digital era, filmmakers and audiences had good reason to think a camera in the room would alter or influence “reality,” a tension documentary master Frederick Wiseman has referred to as the genre’s Heisenberg Principle. But today, with the ubiquity of cameras and screens and performative social self-promotion, there may be no such thing as being watched without knowing or caring you’re being watched, making the slipperiness of Cordero and Croda’s film feel merely contemporary.
Surprisingly, the movie makes no mention of ICE, and there is zero discussion of any kind regarding documentation, legality, or the current American animus toward men like Felipe (which, to be fair, he’s far less likely to confront in the sections of Brooklyn he frequents). The implications rising from his dilemma focused on in the film have only to do with microeconomics, and by extension macroeconomics.
In the meanwhile, the film does what films like this are supposed to do: bring us close, and open our eyes.
I'm Leaving Now is in select theaters (see Cinema Guild), and will be on all streaming platforms in early 2020.