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Daniel DeVivo

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• "Crossing Arizona" — Screening and Talkback

Travel from: New York, NY

Daniel DeVivo believes that films are a powerful resource for popular education and cross-cultural exchange. His first documentary feature, "Crossing Arizona," focused attention on the heightened security in California and Texas that pushes illegal border-crossers into the treacherous Arizona desert in unprecedented numbers — an estimated 4,500 a day. Most are men in search of work, but increasingly the border-crossers are women and children. This influx of migrants crossing through Arizona and the attendant rising death toll have elicited complicated feelings about human rights, culture, class, labor and national security. "Crossing Arizona" was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival, winner of the CINE Masters Series Award and the Cinema Guild's top-selling title on the educational market for two years consecutive years.

DeVivo is currently working with independent journalist Valeria Fernandez on a new documentary called "287(g) County," scheduled for completion by the fall of 2010. In Maricopa, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has the largest police force in the nation enforcing a section of immigration law known as 287(g) that allows the federal government to deputise local police to act as immigration agents. While "Crossing Arizona" documents the funneling of migrants through the state of Arizona and the attendant rise of anti-immigrant sentiment as expressed by the Minutemen, "287(g)" will document the complications that arise when local police agencies are asked to enforce federal immigration policy.

DeVivo has created the website 90daystophoenix.com as a resource for news and discussion about the historical passage of Arizona's SB 1070 — a new law that makes illegal presence a state crime and requires police to determine a person's citizenship.

DeVivo graduated from Harvard with a B.A. in Social Anthropology and a desire to make documentary films. He is also a Fulbright Fellow who will travel to the Middle East in 2011 to study the Jordanian government's attempt to combat internationally pervasive stereotypes about Arab people through prioritizing the development of its domestic film industry.

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