The New Americans is a seven-hour American documentary, produced by Kartemquin Films, that was originally broadcast on American television over three nights on the Public Broadcasting
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The New Americans is a seven-hour American documentary, produced by Kartemquin Films, that was originally broadcast on American television over three nights on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in late March 2004.
The observational documentary, which includes minimal voice-over narration and very little direct interviewing of its subjects (and none in which the interviewer's voice is heard), follows the lives of a series of immigrants to the United States over the course of four years. The series was filmed between 1998 and 2001, although not all of its subjects were filmed during that entire length of time. The immigrants were filmed both in their countries of origin before immigrating as well as in the United States. The filming during this period was extensive and occurred in the subjects' homes, at their places of work, in government offices, and in a number of other situations, many of them quite intimate. As a result, The New Americans offers an unusually personal and comprehensive look at the people it profiles.
The immigrants profiled and filmed in The New Americans include a group of baseball players from the Dominican Republic hoping to secure a career in Major League Baseball; a computer programmer from India and his wife; a family with six children from a farming community in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico; a family of Ogoni refugees from Nigeria; and a woman from Palestine who moves to the United States to be with her new husband, a first-generation Palestinian-American who grew up in Chicago.
The locations shown in the documentary include not only each of the immigrants' countries of origin, but also many places in the United States where the immigrants settled or traveled, including Chicago (the Palestinian and Nigerian immigrants), the Silicon Valley of California (the Indian immigrants), Garden City, Kansas and Mecca, California (the Mexican immigrants), and Florida, Georgia and Montana (the Dominican immigrants).
The New Americans