Jason Sondhi
An award-winner at Sundance and Palm Springs, Green, from Suzanne Andrews Correa and Mustafa Kaymak, is one of the best shorts of recent memory to delve into the unintended and dangerous complications that arise from America’s broken immigration system. Proud, but not demagogic in its political point of view or sympathies, the short wisely fixes upon its subjects: Samet or “Green”, a Turkish NYC pedicab driver assaulted in broad daylight and his brother, Abi, a fellow immigrant who is painfully torn between his fraternal concern and the nightmarish predicament his injured brother presents. Via its humanistic focus, the short is able to steadily unveil a cascade of drama and tragedy, and allow its societal critiques to flow outward from its character-driven plot, as opposed to the reverse.
The film is a marvel of concision—well worth a watch, then a subsequent rewatch in order to fully absorb its elegance in embedding several complex ideas into its central relationship and the circumstances that unfold. The opening scenes of the film speak so much to this intent and its implications—we begin in a squalid apartment as a gathering of men furtively stare out the window, the shot softly obscured via out of focus foreground elements to emphasize the group’s conspiratorial intent. They observe a police officer. Is she there for them? Already Correa is playing with audience expectation. Imagine your regular American film festival-goer—older, white—what would you expect them to make of this group of unkempt Middle Eastern men, anxious about police presence? Smash cut to Green’s back, head down, drenched in sweat as he labors on his pedicab. Oh.
While the film contains many subtle themes, it is this example of negative projection that is the film’s refrain. The audience is implicated at the start, and the film’s plot is largely a succession of echoes—at multiple stops a man’s dire need for sympathy and help is perceived as threat, his anxiousness misinterpreted by society due to prejudice and the inherent need for him to remain formally concealed from said society—despite laboring every day out in the open spaces of it’s crown jewel, Central Park.
And yet Green doesn’t come across as self-righteous. While prejudice is the driver of the plot, most apparently in the unprovoked attack which instigates its crisis, I’d argue that it is less concerned in setting up racist strawmen to knock down than in cogently examining the layers of moral compromise that are necessitated by a system that allows a shadow populace. Shades of gray abound—the police are not tough-talking anti-immigrant enforcers, they merely represent institutionalized danger. People on the subway don’t explicitly castigate Green, they simply keep a worried distance—a bloody and beaten man being, in truth, worthy of trepidation. Correa leans into this by shooting the sequence tight and handheld, invoking a thriller vibe. Lastly and most devastatingly, the community which should be most sympathetic to Green’s plight ultimately turn their back on him for reasons of self-preservation.
A system that permits, but fails to incorporate a community sets up perverse incentives, and it is this original sin that Kaymak and Correa interrogate, through the particularities of the plot, but also the brothers’ philosophical divide. Green, a more recent arrival, embodies entrenched cultural notions of the model immigrant: agreeable and hard-working, he earns his nickname as a nod to his newness and naivete. Abi is a counterpoint to this image—more cynical and confrontational, he seems to acknowledge and reject that embedded in that model of newcomer is the pernicious idea that one should submit to one’s own degradation—that America expects its immigrants, especially its illegal ones, to take what they can get and to be grateful for it. Yet how can one stand their ground, when one’s mere presence on that ground removes their standing?