The Out of the Closet and Onto the Screen series at Ithaca College will kick off its fall schedule with a showing of the documentary “Documented” on Tuesday, Sept. 3. Free and open to the public, the film will be shown at 6 p.m. in Textor 103.
In 2011, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas outed himself as an undocumented immigrant in an article in the New York Times Magazine. “Documented” chronicles his journey to America from the Philippines as a child; his public struggle as an immigration reform activist/provocateur; and his journey inward as he reconnects with his mother, whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years.
“I became a journalist, and later, a filmmaker, to get to know my adoptive country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented, Filipino American,” said Vargas. “This film, to me, is as much an artistic statement as it is a political one: I am not the ‘illegal’ you think I am, and immigration is not what you think it is.”
Vargas has written for daily newspapers and national magazines and was a senior contributing editor at the Huffington Post. While at the “Washington Post” he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the Virginia Tech massacre.
The Out of the Closet and Onto the Screen series is sponsored by the Ithaca College Center for LGBT Education, Outreach, and Services. The theme of this year’s series is “History, Herstory, Our Stories.”
For more information, visit Ithaca.edu/lgbt.