This is a real life documentary where an activist for the workers at the Mississipi Poultry farms spends a short amount of time with Gehemina and her daughter Rosario, you will love them immediately, the happy Rosario who doesn’t know what to do with her life but as any fourteen year old is happy to be playing about, there is a lovely scene where she is celebrating her fourteenth birthday and everybody in the trailer park where her and her mother stays, have come to sing her happy birthday, and at the end of it her face is embedded in the cake(seems this is a Mexican tradition for the birthday individual to have their face embedded in the cake).

You can’t watch this without feeling for the people, these are some of the warmest friendliest people you could come across, ready to open their doors to a stranger, and offering their hospitality yet having nothing, even the trailer park Gehemina lives in is delapidated, the floor boards are moist and easily broken off, and the whole trailer is filled with cockroaches, and as with many people who maybe know their rights but are too scared to cause trouble, or alert the authorities (perhaps there is an illegal immigrant in the vicinity and asking for help via the law could bring unnecessary trouble and unwanted attention to them), she doesn’t want anyone confronting the owner over it, as he has already told her “If you don’t like it leave.”!

This documentray shows the exploitation going on in contemporary Mississipi on the Poultry farms, from previously using blacks to now hiring Latin American workers, who hardly speak the language and who don’t know their rights, some of the stories are heart renching, from the group of guys who have done construction work and are owed $6,000 while the individual who owes them this large amount of money when confronted, comes with his advisor and says he has just come out of jail and will pay in two weeks, and two weeks passes then his wife phones that he has broken his arm and is on morphine(while the absolutely-superb-bunch of guys who have done the work and are owed their money says they will even accept one dollar as part payment if the fellow is telling the truth!), to Gehemina herself having worked for a stipulated $50 a day for two weeks only to be paid $200, while she found out later that the manageress kept the money for her and the other workers, to the corrupt cop who targets Mexican workers between the hours of 2 p.m. and 10 a.m. to extort them for made up traffic offences.

But it is not all doom and gloom, the hard work being done by the campaigner for the Poultry Farm workers goes beyond the call of duty, and her and the local Parish workers will no doubt gain the much needed publicity this area and line of work deserves.

Harrison Ford plays a good natured ICE (Immigration Customs and Enforcement) officer Max Brogan, who along with his partner
the brilliant Cliff “The Chameleon” Curtis, plays his partner (he has played a number of varied roles, a fluent speaking arab in Three Kings, a Colombian terrorist in Collateral Damage, as well as Pablo Escobar in Blow, a Polynesian in Rapa Nui(Easter Island).
In this He plays an Iranian Hamid Baraheri whose brother and sister are citizens, but his father is about to take his citizenship oath shortly, however their sister, an american born has her own ideas of how she would like to live her life, as opposed to the strict lifestyle her father would like for her.

Ray Liotta plays Cole Frankel who works for the Immigration Bureau and decides if an application has merit, he bumps into the lovely Claire Shepard(Alice Eve) a struggling actress, unable to find work as she has no permit, he makes a deal to help her, but it comes at a price, Claire’s on off boyfriend Gavin Kossef (Jim Sturgess, 21) is trying to get a permit based on religious grounds, that he is a practicing Jewish teacher, even though he really is an atheist.

The warm hearted Denise Frankel(Ashley Judd) plays Cole Frankel’s wife, who is an immigration lawyer, she cannot help but get closely involved with a particular case, she happens to run into the superb Summer Blishi (Towel head), who plays a 15 year old Bangladesh girl, who happens to write an essay sympathising with the 9/11 terrorists that has terrible implications for all involved.
Justin Chong(Twilight) plays Yong Kim, about to be naturalised, but really not caring what it means, and his friends are about to drive him into a whole lot of trouble.

Amongst the regular raids on illegal workers, Max Brogan (Harrison Ford) encounters a Mexican lady Mireya Sanchez (Alice Braga) who pleads with him to make sure her little boy is ok, as he is staying with a neighbour, he at first tries to reject her pleas but it is not in his nature
to do so, he seeks the little boy out, and takes him all the way back to Tiguana to his grand parents, on reaching there, he is told by the parents, that Mireya has gone back to the States to bring back her boy.

The acting is superb, and the scenarios believable, several scenes will have you moving and seeing the plight of many we never hear about.