When Monika Navarro was in her second year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), two of her uncles were deported back to Mexico after living their entire lives in the United States. One died shortly after reaching Mexico; the other, her Uncle Augie, struggled to survive as he faced displacement from his home and a lifelong drug addiction that had taken him away from his family numerous times.
Navarro, seeing an opportunity for an artistic endeavor, traveled to Mexico in 2000 to document how her uncle was faring. What began as a seed for a filmmaking idea turned into a full-blown documentary — "Lost Souls," a film exploring not only Augie's deportation, but also the lasting effects of the situation on Navarro's entire family.
In her film, Navarro explores how Augie's deportation affected his children and his sister (Navarro's mother). In exploring Augie's life in Mexico, Navarro also learned about her father, Danny, a man she hadn't seen or talked to since she was a young girl. All of these buried issues came to the surface as Navarro explored the demons plaguing her family.
"At 21, I wasn't mature enough to take on this project; it was clear to me how personal it was going to be," Navarro said. "My uncle was the first one to talk to me about my father ... and that ended up becoming a big part of the story."
The film begins by centering on Augie's deportation and drug addiction, but the film takes on new meaning when Navarro changes the focus to her own issues of abandonment and places herself in the film as a subject.
"I didn't think I'd be forced to explore the relationship with my father," Navarro said. "It mostly came about when I started talking to people about the past in order to understand what brought our family to that point."
Navarro, who took many courses at Tufts to fulfill her Museum School requirements, said that many professors, classes and students helped her with the project. She graduated from the SMFA in 2003.
"My professors were really excited about this project," Navarro said. "I was close with Professor [Gerald] Gill; I learned to interview in his class."
Along with Tufts alumni Jason Mann (LA '01) and Sean Aaronson (LA '02), Navarro taped hours of footage documenting the movements of her family members as they coped with Augie's absence. Mann became the primary cameraman after Navarro realized she didn't have enough camera work to continue on alone, and Aaronson provided the sound work until the film wrapped.
"For years it was just Jason and I," Navarro said. "He helped me write the story and assembled the footage. When we just had the film, we were just trying to push it as far as we could."
"I don't know how much of the final product is a result of what I did," Mann said while laughing. "There were a dozen stories we could've told. My job was helping [Monika] to make those tough decisions, because it was a tough emotional road for her to walk."
Navarro said her greatest challenge came when interviewing her parents. Though she wasn't surprised by her estranged father's unwillingness to answer questions about his past, she didn't expect that her mother would avoid digging into the issues.
"One thing I learned that I didn't expect is that when you try to learn about your family, the people who can tell you the most about yourself are your parents," Navarro said. "At the same time, my parents were the most unwilling to talk about the past."
In one scene, Navarro tries to ask her mother how she met her husband, Navarro's father. Navarro's mother tells a seemingly unrelated story about Danny being pushed on her by her parents.
"You always want a specific answer to a question. I want to know how they got together, and she's talking about her father," Navarro said. "It's not the answer you want, but it's an answer. In talking about my father, she's telling a story about her parents not protecting her."
The theme of abandonment runs throughout the film, as does addiction — both Augie and Danny's father were at one time drug addicts. The film not only tracks one man's journey to get clean from his addiction, but an entire family looking to come back together after being broken apart.
"Everyone was waiting for a moment to talk about these things," Navarro said. "There were times in making the film where I was being too sensitive and trying to honor everyone's stories. When you're making a documentary, you're a journalist in some ways, so you have to tell the best story no matter how it makes someone look."
The film was eventually picked up by PBS, giving Navarro the means to finish it just in time for an airdate on Boston's WGBH station that coincides with the 10-year anniversary of Augie's deportation. Ten years is also the amount of time deported immigrants need before they can apply for reentry into the United States.
"It's impossible to know what would have happened if I wasn't filming," Navarro said. "I hope that forcing my family to deal with the issues must have had some effect."
Navarro's very personal film will air on WGBH on March 28 at 10 p.m. as a part of the "Independent Lens" series.
