Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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When a young couple attends their USCIS immigration interview, they must navigate the surreal and unsettling tactics of an eccentric officer whose psychological games threaten to expose cracks in their seemingly flawless marriage.
Hi, I’m Juan Luis Espinal, a Dominican writer-director based in New York City. This short film is inspired by my real immigration interview at 23, when I was an international student trying to stay in the U.S.
Form I-485: The Interview is a tense psychological drama about power, performance, and the quiet violence of bureaucracy.
As a filmmaker, I’m drawn to controlled tension — psychological, visual, and sonic. My goal is to place the audience inside the room, where silence carries weight and politeness can feel like a threat. Because truth doesn’t always arrive through dialogue. Sometimes it lives in a glance, a pause, a question that sounds harmless but lands like a test.
If viewers walk away unsettled and thinking about their own moments of scrutiny or survival, then the film has done its job.
Tomás and Jennifer aren’t in love. But they have 15 minutes to convince the U.S. government they are.
Form I-485: The Interview drops us into what should be a routine Green Card appointment — and turns it into a high-stakes performance.
The USCIS office feels ordinary: fluorescent lights, government posters, a chipper instructional video looping scripted examples of what to expect. But what unfolds inside the room is anything but routine.
Officer Wu appears polite. Measured. Professional. But beneath that civility is something far more unsettling. What begins as paperwork slowly mutates into a quiet war of control. Every gesture becomes evidence. Every answer, a potential misstep. As Tomás and Jennifer struggle to hold their story together, truth becomes secondary. What matters is how convincingly they can perform.
And just when you think you understand who holds the power, the dynamic shifts again.
As of March 9th, this project has raised $3,000 of their $5,000 goal. This project has 54 days left to raise the $5,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $25, you will get your name on the backers page. For a pledge of $50, you will get your name on their feed. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/529167976/form-i-485-the-interview?
Categories: Crowdsourcing Mornings Stuff
