Chris Vognar

Anti-immigration talk bubbles to the surface in election years and burbles from the mouth of Lou Dobbs seemingly every minute. It's been a rallying cry from the days of the 19th-century Know Nothing movement to today's skirmishes in Farmers Branch. But for those on the outside, the talk often lacks a human dimension. And that's where movies enter the picture.

Patricia Riggen, Guadalajara-born and Columbia University-educated, hopes her Under the Same Moon, which opens today at the Magnolia and Plano Angelika theaters, can be one of those movies.

On one level, it's the most basic and universal of stories: A child, separated from his mother, embarks on an epic journey to find her. "I want to remind people that it's about the human condition and the separation of loved ones," Ms. Riggen said recently in a Dallas hotel conference room.

But the dividing line of this particular separation is the U.S.-Mexican border. Rosario (Kate del Castillo) has journeyed to Los Angeles to make a living as a domestic. Her young son, Carlitos (Adrian Alonso), remains back home in Mexico with his grandmother – until she dies and the kid decides he needs his mom.

Finding mom. It's an impulse so basic that it makes talk of "illegals" sound like a dry policy debate.

"All of the conversations and controversy are always focused on the economic or political side of immigration and not on the human family side of it," Ms. Riggen says. "That's what I wanted to look at. I didn't want to do a political film. I just wanted to show the human side of this story that we hear every day."

Ms. Riggen, 37, heard it every day when she moved from New York to Los Angeles. Just as important, she saw it every day.

"I felt like there were two cities," she says. "I didn't quite know how to feel about it, being Mexican myself. Every single service is provided by immigrant hands. It was very different, and it made me conscious of the situation. I started talking to people about their situations, how they crossed, why they were there, where were their families. I got involved with their stories."

And she felt the need to humanize those stories, which, one could argue, is a political act in itself.

Immigration fears tend to thrive in the abstract. Yes, some who fan the flames of "us vs. them" rhetoric may actually be worried about losing their jobs or fast access to the emergency room. But some of the loudest complainers live in regions barely affected by immigration, legal or illegal. The debate takes on a life of its own, a life that can easily shrivel in the face of the direct human contact dramatized in Under the Same Moon.

Some movies address these circumstances with more political directness. In The Visitor, an excellent little film that will play March 28 at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival and open in Dallas this spring, Richard Jenkins plays Walter, an emotionally stifled economics professor who goes to New York for an academic conference. He ends up befriending Tarek (Hazz Sleiman), a Syrian immigrant who teaches Walter the joys of African drumming and optimism. So far, pretty apolitical.

Then The Visitor wraps the human dimension in more topical matters: faceless detention centers, Kafkaesque post-9/11 immigration policies. Walter's reawakening becomes larger than his own interests. In The Visitor, the personal gradually becomes political.

Ms. Riggen is adamant that she's not interested in sending a message with Moon. "I just want to shed a little light on the people that are around all the time – your gardener, your cleaning lady, the taxi driver, your waiter," she says. "They all have stories, they all have loved ones, and they all have their struggles."

She leaves the obvious unstated: It's harder to hate people once you've walked in their shoes. Even when you walk sitting down in a dark theater.