September 3, 2004

September 3, 2004

FILM REVIEW; Stark, Sketchy Portraits Of Dubious Detentions

By NED MARTEL

The tired and poor whom the Statue of Liberty welcomes describe the pain of disinvitation in ''Persons of Interest,'' a tenderhearted series of incarceration horror stories. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Arabs or Muslims living in the United States had their immigrant status checked in ways that seemed often arbitrary, sometimes systematic and mostly inhumane.

In this soft-spoken documentary, a dozen immigrant stories from the New York area come into focus, with the detainees or their relatives describing out-of-nowhere arrests. In one instance federal agents mistook a son's flight-simulator game on the family hard drive for evidence that the man of the house was preparing to commandeer planes for terror attacks. Interrogators asked another man whether he prayed at a mosque and how often, all to find proof of fundamentalism.

The testimonials are each recorded in the same spare white room, illuminated by what looks like a window but turns out to be a piece of stagecraft. Each immigrant speaks to heard-but-not-seen filmmakers. As the subjects face the camera, their personalities are revealed by their gestures and comportment instead of their homes and neighborhoods, where they might otherwise have been interviewed.

One mother struggles to control her restless, furniture-tipping sons, who have not seen their father, who was deported to Jordan, in 17 months. ''My kids need their father,'' explains this tearful mother, who now works full time and agonizes about whether to uproot her immediate family and head for Jordan when it would mean abandoning her extended one in Albany. ''I have three sons. I can't wrestle with them. It hurts.''

Former detainees describe long months of confinement with food pushed through slots, windowless cellblocks that were always fully illuminated and weepy cellmates with contagious anxiety. One woman describes her first look at her imprisoned husband, who had not been allowed any outside contact -- not even with a lawyer -- for months. Gaunt, he had a long beard and long hair and could not walk without assistance.

''I saw him and I could not speak, and he could not either,'' she recalled.

The emotion of such sagas is indisputable, but a full set of facts on each case is elusive. The perplexing laws, the secondhand storytelling, the language obstacles all complicate a viewer's comprehension of each alleged injustice. Before the film hits its halfway mark, the presentation feels like a frustrating day at an immigration legal clinic where you can never look at the dossier or get to the bottom of the case.

Adding to the one-sidedness are clips of Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose carefully chosen round-'em-up comments seem frank in their aim to jail first and justify later. But his is the only voice of authority heard in the pleading, plaintive hour, and the question arises whether unfairness is being fought with unfairness.

More than 5,000 Arab or Muslim detainees were corralled into custody after the terror attacks, the film asserts. Clearly, for the 12 families profiled here, horrid mistakes harmed the innocent or at least punished minor violators of complicated and selectively enforced immigration laws.

The geopolitical mess has meant that deportation will send some back into intractable dilemmas or violent conditions that they once fled. The film, at the very least, helps put a human face on an unresolved and seemingly un-American agony. According to the documentarians, the war on terror has compounded the terror for some who had obeyed United States rules and found the nation's individual rights suspended when they needed them most.

The documentary, which opens today in Manhattan, will run with a high-adrenaline compilation of minicam shots of an Australian prison break. In the film, ''Through the Wire,'' human rights advocates can't quite believe their own strength when they pull down a fence topped with razor wire. They then greet Arab and Muslim detainees close up, with a second set of metal slats between them. The protesters comfort the startled prisoners, who make a hole in the fence, leaping over guards and into the throng of protesters to make their escape.

The documentary short never makes clear who is charged with what or how many broke out of their confinement, but it presents a supercharged sense that many desperate detainees had sat without interaction with the outside world and without a clear sense of when their cases would be heard.

PERSONS OF INTEREST

Directed by Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse; director of photography, Richard Rutkowski; edited by Sandrine Isambert; music by Stewart Wallace; produced by Lawrence Konner; released by First Run/Icarus Films. Shown with Pip Starr's ''Through the Wire'' at the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Total running time: 76 minutes. These films are not rated.