No Separate Survival

No Separate Survival

Directed by Shabnam Piryaei

In the last several years, border cities in Mexico have come to the center of global news as they have become, unexpectedly, home to thousands of asylum seekers who have found their journeys to the US interrupted through hardline policy and greeted by harsh military deterrent practices. NO SEPARATE SURVIVAL asks the questions: what does it mean to seek asylum? How does one make home on the uncertain journey to seek safety and a place to belong? What role can the arts and culture play in bridging communities in global nexuses of migration, even amidst violence and exclusion?

Produced with content from multiple years of participatory arts workshops that offer training, film equipment, and other creative media to migrants from Tijuana to Oakland, this documentary film centers five former and current asylum seekers alongside different political and social actors involved in immigration policy from divergent political perspectives on both sides of the border. Different forms of deeply personal and original artistic content from LGBTQ+ migrants, cis women, and unaccompanied minors are woven together with on-camera interviews with experts and agencies in a structured film storyline. Such interviews speak strongly to what shifting policies from the US to Central America mean in practice, on the ground, while giving space for those navigating these systems to define their own stories beyond narrow readings of asylum, home, freedom, belonging, and safety.

This film both uplifts border abolition activism in the digital age, while offering opportunities to consider how anthropologists can utilize participatory arts creation to magnify theory generated from the ground up and support new interconnections in practice.

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