When I spoke to Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini in Venice, I asked why he’d made ‘What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?’ His answer still haunts me today, “one of the biggest reasons I made this film is that I realized that progressive America to which I belong, has accepted a level, a threshold of tolerance which includes inequality.” Minervini then added, as a mantra that now accompanies my own daily mundane struggles as a woman “there is no more fight for equality, lesser inequality has become the new equality.” We as a society tolerate, we no longer wholeheartedly accept or deny. And we seem to be OK with tolerating a lot of human beings.

In introducing Lorna Tucker’s latest documentary ‘Amá’ I feel like I must mention my fellow Italian Minervini, because I, like him and Tucker, wear a different pair of glasses when I look at American society today. I see America through the lenses of a first generation immigrant. I don’t see Trump as the new evil, but simply a reincarnation of all that is considered to be as “American as apple pie” — institutionalized racism and the persecution of people who are different and who have the courage to remain different.