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Well-Founded Fear
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Synopsis
Political asylum in the United States -- who deserves it? who gets it? who decides?
Imagine that your life has fallen apart -- something terrible has happened and you've lost every material possession, you've been tortured or seriously hurt, or maybe you've gotten out just in time. You've said goodbye to the people you love and now you find yourself faced with the barest possibility of a new start, a glimmer of hope that you can begin a new life in a strange new place in relative safety. Your papers have been submitted, your file is being processed, and now here is your chance. You will enter a small, fluorescent-lit office where you will have one hour to tell your story to a neutral bureaucrat. Two weeks later you will return to pick up a paper. This page will tell you your fate.
Now imagine yourself on the other side of the desk, in the small bright office. You're an American citizen; you have a good, steady job. You come to work every morning and you have no idea who you'll meet, because a computer assigns cases at random. You walk out into the waiting room and call someone's name -- a name from any one of a hundred countries. Each person comes to tell you a story. Sometimes a lawyer or a translator is there. You have listened to blood-curdling details, you have seen a lot of confusion, and you have heard many lies. In the afternoon you have an additional 90 minutes to research and to write up a defense of your decision. Your job is to convince your supervisor that each person deserves one of two things -- to be invited to stay here in safety, or to be deported. There is no recommendation in between.
Well-Founded Fear is a documentary about what goes on behind the electronic doors of the asylum office, the dramatic real-life stage where American ideals about human rights collide with the nearly impossible task of trying to know the truth. It is an intimate world never before seen on screen -- asylum officers, lawyers, translators, economic migrants, legitimate refugees looking for protection, all focused on the confidential interviews that are the heart of the asylum process. With inside access never before granted to any outsiders, Well-Founded Fear enters the closed corridors of the INS (the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service) for an extraordinary close-up look at what has been called "the Ellis Island of the 21st Century".
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