Marcos Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
A decorated Marine veteran fights to bring her deported husband home — a love story told on both sides of the border.
Synopsis
Marcos Doesn’t Live Here Anymore examines the national issue of immigration with the help of two unforgettable protagonists, demonstrating the human cost of deportation. Elizabeth Perez, a decorated United States Marine veteran and national immigration activist living in Cleveland, tirelessly works to reunite her family after her husband Marcos, an undocumented soccer referee from Mexico, is deported. Meanwhile, Marcos is in Mexico coping with his loneliness, grappling with the urge to cross the border illegally to see his family and the temptation to give up and move on without his wife and children.
With the unfiltered intimacy that is a signature of his work, Sutherland weaves a parallel-action love story that takes us inside a world often lived in the shadows, on both sides of the border. In the end, Elizabeth’s efforts to return her husband hit a legal brick wall, and she is forced to plan for the unthinkable alternative: leaving the United States to live in exile in Mexico and keep her family together. After seven years, Elizabeth, Marcos, and their children are finally reunited in Mexico, but without any sense of how to live together as a family. Ultimately, the love story ends with Marcos and Elizabeth wondering if their relationship will ever recover from the trauma of Marcos’s deportation.
Marcos Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a co-production of FRONTLINE, Independent Lens and VOCES, and premiered on PBS in April 2019.
Press
“Forget trying to fit the images or narrative into one neat box or another, and just give yourself over to Sutherland’s storytelling. The film draws you in with one moving scene after another.”
“Sutherland’s film, while disarmingly intimate, feels epic in scope. Coming at a time of particular politicization of the issue of the US’s broken immigration system and its deleterious impact on families, the film is also notable in its resistance to easy partisanship or demonization of either side, instead using the story of the Perez family to humanize and universalize the immigration issue in the hopes of finding a better way forward.”
“As in his previous films, Sutherland masterfully depicts the passage of time and its effect on his subjects.”
“PBS’ ‘Marcos Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ depicts toll of deportation.”
“‘Marcos Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ shows what deportation does to families.”
“One of David Bianculli’s best bets.”
Features and reviews
Marine vet counts on prayer, faith to reunite with deported husband (The Dialog)
Ohio veteran’s immigration fight for her husband featured by FRONTLINE (Ideastream / Cleveland NPR)
