“Documented” is the new immigration documentary from Jose Antonio Vargas that is the centerpiece film at this year’s AFI Docs festival in Washington, D.C., and it tracks the one-time Washington Post reporter’s personal story as an undocumented immigrant (he revealed his undocumented status in a New York Times magazine piece in 2011).
“To me, immigration means I don’t have a driver’s license, I don’t have a green card and I don’t have a passport,” Vargas told POLITICO. “I came to this country in August 1993 and I haven’t seen my mother in twenty years this August. … To me, a broken immigration system means broken families, which means broken lives and I think that’s one of the messages of the film.”
Since Vargas’s New York Times magazine piece, he’s become perhaps the most public undocumented immigrant in the United States (he graced the cover of TIME magazine in 2012, along with others). It’s a level of exposure that Vargas says he’s not always comfortable with.