Nobody can agree on what we call the decade from 2010 to 2019. The 10s? The tenties? The tweenies? (Maybe, no and absolutely not.)
But most people can agree that it was a rough ten years.
The climate emergency accelerated, culture wars roiled our societies, Brexit tore apart the UK. This sense of chaos reached its apogee with the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
The Trump years required a constant recalibration of what could happen.
From the Muslim ban to the validation of actual Nazis (or “those tiki torch assholes” as Trevor Noah memorably described them), the most outlandish and cruel ideas became not just possible, but policy.
USA v Scott (2020), co-directed by Ora DeKornfeld and Isabel Castro, was created in this febrile atmosphere.
It tells the story of Scott Warren, a humanitarian aid volunteer who was arrested for helping two men who’d crossed US border near Ajo, Arizona.
If convicted, Scott faced 20 years in prison for giving food and water to two desperate people who’d spent days in the desert.
The case is infuriating, but the film is remarkable in its restraint. It follows Scott, his fellow volunteers and the wider townsfolk as they grapple with their central role in an increasingly hostile and divisive situation.
Rather than editorialise, Ora and Isabel let events unravel in front of them. And in doing so, they ask perhaps the most consequential question of all: what sort of people do we want to be?
I spoke with Ora over Zoom from her home in California. You can see more of her work on her website and her Vimeo.
Why did you want to tell this story?
I had Lyme disease for many years, and so I had to leave my job at the New York Times, and leave New York. I realised I just had to focus on healing if I was ever going to get better – it’s a very complicated, difficult disease to get over.
So I went to the desert which seemed like the place to recover, you know hot sun and dry air, and I was doing these alternative treatments.
The thing that I did to have purpose beyond that was volunteering on the border with No More Deaths.
I did this month-long immersive volunteer thing where you’re living in the desert and every day you’re hiking out on these migrant trails, dropping water and checking on other drops.
Scott was one of the fellow volunteers and someone we learned about during the training. Like by the way, you should know if you do this work, this is very uncommon, but this horrendous thing can happen to you which is being charged with a 20-year felony.
I wanted to make this film because it felt like a way to tell an immigration story from a totally new perspective.
And from the perspective of someone who, for better or worse, could galvanise and garner empathy from people from all over the political spectrum.
That was a moment in the Trump administration where they were wanting to make an example out of people doing this kind of work. It was right after the Muslim ban, and part of a series of things like this.
What were the biggest challenges?
We really wanted to include, or offer the opportunity to include, the voices of the two men ( José Sacaria-Goday and Kristian Perez-Villanueva) that the film was very much centred around, the two men Scott gave food and water to.
What are their stories? Where are they now? How do they make sense of all this?
But we weren’t able to – we never got a response back when we reached out, so we don’t actually know what happened to them after they were detained.
And then with the people doing the work, they are very distrusting of media, very anti-establishment.
Scott, to his credit, didn’t want to be a main character. He wanted to be in the documentary because he thought it was important, but he really didn’t want to be shown as a hero.
So we tried to include as many voices from the town as we could, because it really is something that not just Scott is doing.
This town has a tradition of helping people, and Scott’s story was the high stakes version of that. We incorporated these Greek chorus moments from the town to make it a broader narrative.
We also had to think – how is this film going to land for an international audience? How much explaining do we need to do about the context of the American border land? We had to try to understand how those scenes would land for people who aren't living here.
Tell me about your co-director, Isabel Castro, and your relationship making this film.
Isabel and I have worked together in one capacity or another since the very beginning of our careers. In 2019 we found ourselves both working on different projects in the Tucson area.
I was immensely grateful that she wanted to help tell this story with me. She’s been covering immigration her whole career, and she really understood the power of Scott's story to reach a broad audience.
And she always says that documentary is an endurance game. She’s really good at being like, this is a good story and so we’re going to make it. Whereas I can be so emotional, and overly precious about the story
Isabel is much more pragmatic. She really brought this producer energy of, let’s make this.
What would you do differently if you made the film again?
We really wanted to include the story of the Sanctuary movement and interweave that with what was happening today, so it became like a parallel narrative. But we couldn’t quite crack the storytelling puzzle within the short film format.
The Sanctuary movement was created in this area of Tucson, Arizona in the 1980s when people from Guatemala and El Salvador were being denied asylum.
A guy named John Fife, a Presbyterian reverend, and a goat farmer named Jim Corbett banded together and started this whole underground railroad bringing people over who they felt were being unfairly rejected as asylum seekers.
They were eventually infiltrated by law enforcement and several of them were given felony charges – nuns, priests, church-going ladies.
They were all found guilty, unlike Scott, and they were given six months probation. It was sort of like a tokenistic sentence, but symbolism is important in these things.
I think that story lays the groundwork that Scott is neither the first person to be doing this work, nor is he the first to be penalised for it. It’s a long tradition.
And I also think it provides hope. I think it was sort of a hopeless moment, even though Scott was found innocent. It wasn’t a good time for us as a country, and I think that parallel story can provide a bit of inspiration.
What are you most proud of?
I’m just proud that so many people have seen it. And from what people have written to us, and partnerships we did with human rights organisations, it feels like it’s been a good educational resource beyond the typical target audience.
How did making this film change you?
It hammered home for me how important it is to work with someone who’s really down for the project of making a documentary.
Because it’s such a weird thing to propose to somebody, oftentimes there is some amount of educating them about what the process is going to look like, and a little bit of nudging them, like, why don’t we just start and see how it feels?
That’s a very common place to start a doc. And I think it’s good to allow the space for that, for both people, and see if it can become a symbiotic relationship.
But I'm not interested in working with participants who aren’t 100% into the project in the early stages.
I think with this project, the anti-media sentiment among the volunteers made the whole filming process a constant negotiation. it never gathered momentum and we never landed into a comfortable rhythm.
I never felt like an insider, even though I started as an insider, as a volunteer.
But it’s understandable, given the work they do. And this was such a tense, scary moment that maybe that just wasn't possible under those conditions.
I’m constantly struck by how honest filmmakers are in these conversations. Perhaps it’s because they have some distance from the films we’re discussing, which tend to be a few years old.
Whatever the reason, they bring an openness and vulnerability to these interviews that I so appreciate.
Huge thanks to Ora, and as ever, hit reply if you want to send me comments, suggestions or photos of your favourite road sign.