‘The Illegal’: new film shows dark side of American dream for Indian immigrants

Danish Renzu’s gritty, realistic story of an aspiring filmmaker from India in pursuit of the ‘American dream’ aims to act as a window on the migrant experience

It looks to expose the ‘true side of America’, the filmmaker said, and show audiences that behind every ‘illegal immigrant’ is a relatable story

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A promotional poster for the film 'The Illegal' from Kashmiri director Danish Renzu. Photo: Handout

Published: 5:00pm, 17 Jan 2021Updated: 9:19pm, 17 Jan 2021

Hassan Ahmad, an aspiring young filmmaker from New Delhi, had no idea of the difficulties he would face when he decided to leave behind his middle-class life in the Indian capital to chase his “American dream” in the United States.

The protagonist of The Illegal, from 34-year-old Kashmiri director Danish Renzu, is forced to drop out of film school after encountering problems with his student loan and starts working full-time in an Indian restaurant as an undocumented migrant to support his family.

Played by Suraj Sharma of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi fame, Hassan serves as a proxy for the more than 1 million migrants who arrive in the US each year, Los Angeles-based Renzu told This Week in Asia.

“The film is about people who come to the US with the American dream but eventually understand the true side of America only when they start living here,” he said. “I want the audience to acknowledge that each illegal immigrant has an individual story that we can relate to.”

A US Homeland Security Investigations officer guards suspected undocumented migrants in this 2019 file photo. Photo: HO/US Immigration and Customs Enforcement/AFP

There were 10.35 million undocumented immigrants living in the US as of July 2019, according to the New York-based Center for Migration Studies, a non-partisan think tank. Of these, around 611,000 came from India – the second largest population behind the 1 million or so who were from Mexico.