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IN
THIS WORLD EXPOSES PEOPLE SMUGGLING, CASA
DE LOS BABYS UNMASKS THE BABY ADOPTION RACKET
 In
This World appears to be a documentary of a
true story, but in the style of the Blair
Witch Project (1999). The plot is about
sixteen-year-old orphan Jamal Udin Torabi and his cousin,
twentysomething Enayatullah, two Afghan refugees in the Shamshatoo
refugee camp of one million Afghan refugees outside Peshawar,
Pakistan, who start out in February 2002 to go to London.
They are two of some one million refugees around the world
each year who pay a sum of money to organizers of a people
smuggling operation, that is, an underground railroad for
undocumented illegals to go from a very poor country to a
First World country. The filming starts with a bus and truck
trip from Peshawar to Quetta and on to Iran, though they
are sent back by police to Pakistan and then return. Going
through Kurdish Iran, they trek on foot through the snow
undetected past Iraq to Turkey, and then fit into a container
on board a cargo ship from Istanbul to Trieste. Enayatullah
and a few others do not survive the container trip for lack
of fresh air; they are no longer "in this world." After
arriving in Trieste, Jamal pays for a train ticket to France
after stealing from a woman's purse. Then he lies on a wood
plank on the bottom of truck that crosses the chunnel into
England and on to London, a trip six months in all. Titles
at the end say that Jamal's application for refugee status
is denied, but he is given extraordinary permission to remain
temporarily; he must leave England on the day before his
eighteenth birthday. Director Michael Winterbottom makes
a quiet plea for more acceptance of refugees who flee from
hopeless conditions, but his more explicit prayer is that
more money should be spent to help the refugees that Jamal
left behind, given the $7.9 billion cost of the bombing in
the Afghan War that created so many of the Peshawar refugees.
MH
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women with means in the United States want but cannot biologically
have children. Many women in Latin America have children
but cannot afford to care for them. The solution would
appear to be for the Americans to adopt the babies. In Casa
de los Babys, directed by Political Film
Society awardwinner John Sayles, the reality of the solution
is laid bare. When the film begins, we view the babies
at Posada Santa María, known as "La Casa de
los Babys." Soon, we view the women who have arrived
in town to adopt, the women who have given up their babies
for adoption, the men who are unemployed and cannot support
wives and children, the children who live on the street
because they were not adopted or are unwanted, and the
corrupt bureaucracy that stands in the way of efficient,
quick adoption so that American women will spend as much
money as possible in the hotels while patiently--and impatiently
in at least one case--awaiting to have a baby to bring
home. Nan (played by Marcia Gay Harden), the impatient
one, is understandably fed up after two months; ultimately
she tries to bully and bribe a lawyer to finish the paperwork
and succeeds despite her obvious appearance to all as an
unfit mother. The main problem from the host country's
point of view appears to be that none of the adoptive mothers
speak Spanish, so the children will lose an important part
of their identity; but prospective mothers are not told
that secret. (The actual filming is in México, though
the location is supposed to be an unidentified South American
country.) Since there is a residency requirement for adoption,
the women are stuck in a hotel operated by profiteering
Señora Muñoz (played by Rita Moreno), who
has disdain for the ill-groomed women while her son sees
them as imperialistic parasites. Casa de los
Babys, thus, is an exposé of a racket
and a tragedy, what happens when rich Americans are juxtaposed
with poor people in Third World conditions who relate at
the material rather than the spiritual level. The Political
Film Society, accordingly, has nominated Casa
de los Babys as best film exposé of
2003. MH
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