‘Under the Same Moon’ director on immigration crackdown: ‘It’s called fascism’

When Mexican director Patricia Riggen first debuted her critically acclaimed feature film “Under the Same Moon” 18 years ago, she anticipated tears from audiences and increased sympathy to the plight of migrants in the United States. But she could have never predicted the militarized crackdown on migrants happening today.

“If I made ‘Under the Same Moon’ right now, I would not make it like that,” said Riggen in a phone interview. “It would be dark as hell.”

The fictional drama follows 9-year-old Carlitos (played by Adrián Alonso), who lives in Mexico with his ailing grandmother, while his mother Rosario (Kate del Castillo) navigates life as an undocumented worker in Los Angeles. After his grandmother’s sudden death, Carlitos crosses the border alone in search of his mother, piecing together details of her whereabouts from their past routine phone calls.

After its 2007 debut at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation, “Under the Same Moon,” which was titled “La Misma Luna” in Spanish, was picked up by [Fox] Searchlight Pictures and released in theaters the following year. It broke box office records for any Spanish-language movie in the United States at the time.

While lighthearted in brief moments, thanks to Carlitos’ bond with a grouchy wayward migrant named Enrique (Eugenio Derbez), the storyline reflected the harrowing journey traversed by many migrants in the U.S. in the early 2000s, told through the eyes of a child. “It gave a human face to a statistic and to a political problem,” says Riggen.

“That’s why it became the phenomenon that it was back then, and now here we are,” said Riggen — referring to the ongoing ICE sweeps by masked law enforcement, detainment of U.S. citizens and the deportations of migrations without due process.

De Los interviewed Riggen about the enduring impact of her film, “Under the Same Moon,” the same day she reunited with Derbez and screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos on a June 26 panel hosted by the National Assn. of Latino Independent Producers. “It is the first time that we are getting together again, and it’s an important time,” Riggen said. “I think that this movie [provides] a little bit of hope for the Latino community.”

This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.

It’s been almost two decades since the release of “Under the Same Moon.” How have its themes evolved since 2007?
Unfortunately, nothing has changed for the better. It’s changed for the worse. I feel like things are worse than ever. There’s things that never happened before, like deportations to third-party countries, or detentions without due process, detentions by people who are not identifying themselves. We don’t even know if they are actually ICE agents.

As a member of the Latin American community, I can tell you that it has a name and it’s called fascism. It gives me shivers, because if you are from Latin America you immediately remember Argentina, Chile and Brazil. That’s how they used to operate. They would just come over to their homes and take them. No identification, no nothing. I wish the American people could see that, but they don’t know it because they’ve never seen it before. It is the worst-case scenario that I can imagine.

When we made “La Misma Luna,” there were thousands of unaccompanied minors. That was the original inspiration for Ligiah Villalobos, when she wrote the first draft of the film. It was a groundbreaking movie because it used to be a string of sad, depressing dark [immigration] movies, but this was different. The movie had a more heartwarming, positive outlook. It still touched on super complex subject matters, but the intention was to show immigrants in a positive light, good people with good values. People become immigrants out of necessity, because of poverty, violence, persecution.

If you were to make the movie now, would the tone overshadow those glimmers of hope?
That’s how I feel right now. I would do a deep dive like “El Norte,” because that film was another emblematic movie on the subject matter. That was dark and tough. Then came “La Misma Luna,” which I thought was lighter. I wanted to make a movie that the Latino audience connected with and immigrants could watch. But the tone would be different. I would do a deep dive into the problem. I stayed away from making the movie political and concentrated more on the love story with the mother-son relationship. … Now I feel like it’s time to have more of a political angle. Half the country still believes that immigrants are criminals, but being able to feed your loved one is a human right.

If you continued the film where it left off, with Carlitos and his mom reuniting, where would they be in today’s America?
That’s what [Villalobos] and I have been working on. We’ve been approached a few times to create a series on “La Misma Luna,” so to answer that question, it will be in the TV series that I’m hoping for. I feel like the country is really attuned to the plight of the immigrants 1751424283, which wasn’t necessarily the case 17 years ago.

What do you think was so appealing about this film when it was released?
It touched on universal emotional issues that everybody could identify with. You didn’t need to be Mexican or have crossed the border. Love was at the center of it. That’s how I conceived it. Sometimes I get the feeling that if [Alonso] had been a mainstream actor, he would have gotten nominated for something, but that’s the story of making Latino movies. We haven’t been able to break through the mainstream and it’s something that we are fighting every day.

I find Hollywood, my industry, to be a little bit responsible for the hostility that Latinos and immigrants find as a community in the U.S. Our representation of Latinos has rarely been positive. We have to turn things around and represent the community in a positive light, not just the negative way that is prompting hostility by half of the country.