Project History

The original Life or Liberty video, which premiered at Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in 2002, tells the poignant story of Shokriea Yaghi, the wife of a 9/11 detainee.

Our second project played a significant role in the campaign for the release of Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti from immigration detention. We secured a prison interview with Farouk and collaborated with his support committee on a six-minute video they used to organize events across the country.

In 2004, as the Republican National Convention approached, Life or Liberty documented the life of a Bangladeshi American family facing the deportation of the father as the result of Special Registration, a massive act of national security profiling which targeted 80,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries. Rising Up: The Alams became a valued outreach tool highlighting the work of South Asian community organization Desis Rising Up and Moving.

In the years following we developed our first feature documentary Enemy Alien, telling the dramatic story of the fight to free Farouk Abdel-Muhti through the eyes of director Konrad Aderer. The film brought together the Japanese American and Muslim Palestinian experience, winning a Courage in Media award from Council for American-Islamic Relations in 2012.

As director Konrad Aderer traveled the U.S. and Canada showing Enemy Alien, he was producing the groundbreaking Resistance at Tule Lake. This feature, aired on PBS in 2018, tells the long-suppressed story of incarcerated Japanese Americans who defied their unjust treatment during World War II.

Since the 2016 Presidential election campaign, an emboldened white supremacist movement has taken control of the U.S. government’s agenda. They are enacting a policy wishlist that revives key features of our country’s original anti-Asian immigration platform. The spirit and rationale of the Chinese Exclusion era live on in family incarceration, child separation, attacks on birthright citizenship, and the Muslim refugee ban.

But even in this time of openly racist state violence, immigrants are putting themselves on the line to demand that our country live up to universal democratic principles. Life or Liberty continues to engage the power of storytelling in new ways to empower the people carrying on this generational struggle.