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WASHINGTON D.C. -- Opening up last week’s DC Asian Pacific American (APA) Film Festival was Geoffrey Quan’s The Other Way Around, a fiction story of a Filipina American immigrant who believed she was ‘legal’ until the death of her parents two years prior to facing deportation.

Quan bases his main character, Lucia “Lucie” Grace Buenaflor, on the heartbreaking story of first generation siblings of FilAm family from Fremont, Calif. -- Donna, Dale, and Dominique Cuevas, who were deported in 2004. Lucie is to marry her best friend’s fiancée to keep her legal status in the U.S.

He said, “In the 80s a lot of families coming with small children and toddlers, a number of these families chose not to tell their children that they’re here illegally. As a result of 9/11, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) Homeland Security cracking down, many of these children were learning about these status as adults when INS literally, show up at your door and say ‘you have 60 days to leave the country.’ Because they left at such a young age, had no recollection of where they come from, they all primarily spoke English. The genesis [was] the idea of these people who had self-identified as Americans, saw themselves as having to reconceive their identity.”

While none of the cast is FilAm, the Asian American cast portrays an accurate picture of the immigration situation FilAms and other Asian American immigrants face.

Quan’s own grandfather was held at Angel Island when he was 12 years old, though he was a natural-born U.S. citizen Chinese American when his parents wanted him to pursue education in China.

“My own ancestors had entered this country more than 100 years ago, under constant threat of apprehension, interrogation, and deportation,” he said. “Reading about the Cuevas family (via the news series by Cicero Estrella’s SF Chronicle) made me incredibly angry that after all this time, we continue to enact and execute policies that harm those that would otherwise seek a better life.”

Quan cites 1996 laws that have made families like the Cuevas unable to waive their deportation, gain political asylum (citing martial law). The Cuevas’ last resort was attempting to gain Congressional sponsorship of private immigration bills by Senators Barbara Boxer and Feinstein, a very rarely accomplished feat.

The film is also another way to push attention toward immigration issues in general, though may not be necessarily a push for reforming laws in next year’s comprehensive immigration reform debate.

Quan said, “Thousands of illegal immigrants come into the United States every year, and thousands more are turned back. It is easy to see only statistics, to compartmentalize and abstract such information as concerning only “the other.” The Other Way Round personalizes the abstraction, and in the glare of the divide offers a very haunting and human look at that which is most universal, love – the bonds between friends and family, and Lucie’s struggle between selfish and selfless love.”