Film Depicts Plight of Cuban Rafters

Film Depicts Plight of Cuban Rafters

By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ
Associated Press Writer

February 8, 2006, 7:01 PM EST

MIAMI -- When director Carlos Gutierrez set out to make a short film
about two Cuban rafters stranded on a deserted island off the coast of
Florida, he hoped the movie might renew interest in the U.S.
government's wet foot/dry foot immigration policy.

He never set out to make a movie ripped from the headlines.

Then last month the Bush administration sparked a firestorm when it
declared an abandoned bridge in the Florida Keys didn't count as "dry
land" and sent back 15 Cubans who had landed there. Suddenly the
Miami-native found himself not only promoting his new Spanish-language
film but smack dab in the middle of a major political debate.

Under the long-standing policy, Cubans who are picked up at sea are
usually returned home, while those who reach U.S. soil are allowed to stay.

"It was a story that was there, under the radar, but the best I could
hope for was that people would see it and say 'Oh, we should pay
attention.' I never imagined this coincidence," Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez hopes to turn "Wet Foot/Dry Foot," featuring Spanish-language
soap star Francisco Gattorno and fellow Cuban actor Jorge Alvarez, into
a feature-length movie. A debut screening of the film, which Gutierrez
wrote for his masters' thesis at New York University, was held Feb. 2nd
at the University of Miami.

The film follows two starving migrants as they argue over whether to
stay on the island or swim to a nearby boat a 100 yards off shore in
hopes of finding food -- risking being caught by the U.S. Coast Guard
with "feet wet."

The film arrives just weeks after a Cuban-American activist ended an
11-day hunger strike protesting the removal of the 15 migrants, who
landed on the abandoned bridge Jan. 4, just about 100 yards from a
bridge that is considered U.S. territory. The Bush administration has
since agreed to meet with several Florida U.S. congressional
representatives to discuss the policy.

Immigration attorney William Sanchez, who is representing relatives of
the migrants in a legal challenge to the federal policy, said he hopes
the film will give Americans a better understanding of the issue.

"Were seeing in the fiction something that seems absurd, but it's not as
absurd as the form in which it's actually being applied on a daily and
weekly basis," Sanchez said.

Gattorno, who currently stars in Telemundo's "Land of Passions," and was
also featured in the 2000 drama, "Before Night Falls," said making the
film was both exhilarating and painful, forcing him to relive his own
decision to leave Cuba in 1994. Although he left through legal channels,
Gattorno recalled not being able to see his father for more than eight
years.

"It was a time of little hope," he said. "It's something that is still raw."

Gutierrez, the son of two Cuban immigrants, said he hopes the film will
provide a human side to the debate over immigration -- not just the
Cuban experience -- but also that of Mexicans and Central Americans.

But he says he tried hard to avoid making the 18-minute film, shot in
eight days in the Florida Keys, explicitly political.

"I didn't want it to be propaganda," he said. "I wanted it to be about
the story. It's the basic human struggle of not only wanting to survive
but wanting to seek freedom and seek freedom at any cost."

Copyright © 2006, The Associated Press
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