Oscar-nominated Detroit native’s new film is a gay love story about undocumented immigrants – Detroit Free Press
When Heidi Ewing was at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her documentary on Detroit’s economic struggles, “Detropia,” she wound up having a long conversation with two friends who came to Park City, Utah, to support her.
“One night, they told me their whole life story, after six years of friendship,” remembers Ewing.
Their moving, harrowing real-life experiences inspired “I Carry You With Me,” a gay love story that chronicles how two men from Mexico fell in love and made the difficult decision to come to the United States as undocumented immigrants, leaving behind crucial pieces of their lives.
The movie, which opened Friday at the Maple Theater in Bloomfield Hills, is the first narrative feature from Ewing, who grew up in Farmington Hills and is a leading force in documentary films. She has co-directed several award-winning docs in that genre with Rachel Grady, including 2007’s “Jesus Camp,” which earned an Oscar nomination.
“I Carry You With Me” is a visually beautiful, often emotionally painful movie that chronicles a decades-long romance by jumping back and forth in time. It follows Ivan, an aspiring chef (Armando Espitia) with a young son, who meets and falls in love with Gerardo (Christian Vázquez), a teacher from a ranching family.
Both men hide their relationship in public to avoid becoming the target of homophobic violence. They also keep their sexual orientation a secret from family members who don’t approve. In one particularly grueling scene, Gerardo is shown as a small boy being driven to the middle of nowhere at night by his furious father, who leaves him to walk home alone.
When Ivan makes the difficult decision to cross the border by foot into the United States to find better work, Gerardo stays behind. Denied a visa and beaten up by thugs, he eventually joins Ivan and they build a life together in New York City, where memories of Mexico linger.
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“I Carry You With Me” is a hybrid vehicle of sorts. It uses scenes of Espitia and Vazquez (and also two child actors) as the two main characters and mixes in footage of the real men, Ivan Garcia and Gerardo Zabaleta, who now have two restaurants in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn.
The blending is so successful that viewers might mistake Garcia and Zabaleta for actors cast as the middle-aged version of their characters. That’s what director Rodrigo Garcia of HBO’s “In Treatment” reboot assumed when he saw the movie, according to Ewing.
“He was (like), ‘Heidi, I didn’t know until the credits!,”” she says.
The film has been praised for the sensitive portrayal of its lead characters and for depicting the personal costs for those who leave their country and lose the chance to visit their families — an aspect of undocumented immigration that is often ignored in the heat of political debates.
“In Ewing’s hands and as anchored by two superb performances, Ivan and Gerardo’s romance gets scaled up to an epic, a searing saga of the undocumented experience in which love is the binding force,” said Entertainment Weekly.
Ewing says she was so moved by Garcia and Zabaleta’s real-life story that she originally wanted to make a documentary about them. But she soon changed direction.
“I realized that actually what I was shooting was the third act of a movie. Because everything else was in the past — the romance, the epic sweeping nature, the memories as children. There was no way I could, in a satisfying way, bring that into a documentary.”
Adds Ewing, “I was like, I don’t want to settle for a good documentary.” So she set out to make a scripted drama, working with her co-screenwriter, Alan Page Arriaga.
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Shooting began in Mexico in October 2018 and moved in December of that year to New York City. Throughout filming, Ewing says, “My inner dialogue was, like, ‘Don’t get it wrong. Make it authentic.'”
There were some unexpected art-imitates-life moments. While filming scenes in Mexico of Ivan’s border crossing, Ewing and her crew spotted people from the real-life migrant caravan that became a campaign issue for then-President Donald Trump, not to mention a frequent target of his verbal tirades.
Undocumented immigration was such a divisive hot button during the Trump administration that Ewing at one point considered changing the names of the main characters to protect their identities.
“The randomness of who was getting deported under Trump was terrifying, like, roundups happening in New York, random people,” says Ewing. “The conventional wisdom was thrown out the window of who was at risk.”
Garcia and Zabaleta wouldn’t let her change anything. “That really propelled me forward,” she says of their willingness to have their story told.
The film’s love scenes between Espitia and Vazquez are filmed to convey the hidden nature of their early romance in Mexico. “They’d never dare hold a hand or touch a shoulder, anything in public,” says Ewing. “We filmed those things in a very sort of voyeuristic and clandestine, almost claustrophobic, way because it’s really about stealing moments. They were stealing moments together and my camera was stealing moments of them.”
The time-jumping element of the movie reflects how Ivan and Gerardo, like millions of other undocumented residents of this country, hold on to their memories of home.
Says Ewing, “Many, many, many immigrants who’ve seen this movie tell me, documented or undocumented, especially people who can’t go back … ‘I live that way. I’m thinking, I’m remembering the scent or the chirp of a bird.’ … It is like a constant loop and that is what I was trying to show.”
The film had its world premiere in January 2020 at Sundance. It won the audience and innovator awards in the festival’s NEXT category, which is devoted to independent movies that take a forward-thinking approach to storytelling.
It was supposed to arrive in theaters in June 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic put everything on hold. There was, however, a drive-in screening at the New York Film Festival in September 2020 that Ewing says “was amazing.’
Meanwhile, Ewing spent much of the quarantine working on a documentary for HBO that she and Grady are making with journalist Ronan Farrow. It’s about investigative journalists around the world and the personal risks posed by such reporting.
“We started shooting it before the pandemic, and then all of our subjects of the film, the journalists themselves, began to cover COVID and were out on the streets and in the mix, doing their job,” she says. “For us to not follow them was obviously not the right thing to do.”
Ewing and Grady will direct the project, with Farrow executive producing.
For Ewing, the weight of getting things right was just as heavy during the making of “I Carry You With Me” as it is when she’s doing a documentary.
“It was a very heavy burden to make films about friends. I tell other people not to do it and then I broke my own rule,” she says. Garcia and Zabaleta granted her total creative control, a leap of faith Ewing describes as “an act of friendship towards me.”
As much as Ewing wants to make great movies, she doesn’t want to sacrifice her friendships in the process.
“I lost a lot of sleep literally about it,” says Ewing, who remains good friends with Garcia and Zabaleta. “I thought if I walk out of this thing and I’ve lost my friends then this is for nothing. It’s not worth it.”
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
‘I Carry You With Me’
Opens Friday, July 2, at the Maple Theater
R (for language and brief nudity)