Resident Exile (1981) [N/A]

Gallery Unavailable

Release Date:
March 11, 1981

Original Title:
Resident Exile

Genres:
Documentary

Production Countries:
United States of America

Ratings / Certifications:
 N/A

Runtime: 28

This short film, made with my friends and filmmaking partners, Michel Negroponte and Alex Anthony, was commissioned by PBS's innovative TV Lab in 1980. The three of us saw Kazem Ala, an Iranian student and political exile, briefly interviewed on a local cable access show in Austin, Texas and were very moved by his story. We spent a month filming his day to day life in Houston, during the Iranian-American hostage crisis of 1980. The film was meant to describe in subtle ways what it is to be a political exile in times of political crisis. PBS found it to be a little too subtle, and declined to air it nationally, but the film was televised on various individual PBS outlets, and seeing it recently, I was struck by how, a generation later, we're still dealing with this same situation - the clash between Islam and the West. The Presidents and Ayatollahs may have changed, but politically, things are still at crisis level. - Ross McElwee

Additional information:

The Search Form


About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.