I Think You Should Come to America

In I Think You Should Come to America the correspondence between two young and naïve penfriends serves as a vehicle to explore the dangers of seeing cultures different from our own as ‘other.’ A young Polish woman (myself), coming of age in the dying embers of Communist Poland, seeks escape in the re-imagining of a romance with the American Dream through her correspondence with a young Native American man. Using only his letters sent to her, she presents her penfriend’s own need to escape, voiced to a montage of poetic imagery, presenting multiple views of both Poland and America at pivotal points in their history. What results is a nuanced and often contradictory picture that is left to the viewer to disassemble. In I Think You Should Come to America cultural conditions in which memories are created are exposed through the medium of film, as the viewer is asked to question the politics of cinematic representation.

Funded by the Arts Council of England (UK), New Mexico Arts, New Mexico Humanities Council, McCune Charitable Foundation, Albuquerque Community Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities (in collaboration with Experiments in Cinema, USA).

Winner of the Honourable Mention Award, LA Underground Film Forum, Los Angeles, California, USA.