GatewAY TO A NEW LIFE
Can immigrants save a struggling city?
Please join us at an upcoming screening of "Gateway to a New Life"
Tuesday February 11, 2025 4:00-6:00 pm
Millennium Student Center, Century Room A&B
Sponsored by the UM St. Louis History Department
Featuring Zamzama Safi, filmmaker Kathy Bratkowski and Lindsey
Spencer, Family Support Coordinator, Welcome Neighbor St. Louis.
Sign up below for news of upcoming screenings.
Many thanks to the Ethical Society of St. Louis for inviting us to screen "Gateway to a New Life" during the Sunday, January 12, 2025 program. (Photo credits: Ethical Society of St. Louis)
"Gateway to a New Life" was awarded Best Documentary Feature in the 2025 Great Uplift Film Festival.
Stockholm, Sweden
October 19-20, 2024
Narrated by Afghan actor and social activist
The population of St. Louis is on a downward trajectory.
Are immigrants the solution?
St. Louis city officials and business leaders want to attract thousands of Afghan refugees and immigrants to St. Louis. The Afghan families include men and women who worked for the U.S. military.
Many remain in refugee camps overseas, visas mired in red tape. The U.S. promised these military contractors that they'd bring them to America.
Since the mid-1990s, thousands of Bosnians have settled in St. Louis, opening new businesses and reviving neighborhoods. Can St. Louis replicate the Bosnian immigrant experience with these new refugees?
In "Gateway to A New Life," meet the people behind the Afghan Support Program and the resilient Afghans who are building new lives in St. Louis.
Director's Statement
As we enter a time of uncertainty about the future of immigrants in the United States, “Gateway to a New Life” runs counter to the current rhetoric by showing that immigrants enrich the cities in which they settle, bringing interesting, vibrant cultures and economic growth through entrepreneurship and hard work.
St. Louis is my hometown and I’ve seen the city’s problems increase. The city has experienced a dramatic population loss and its reputation has suffered. However, all is not as it seems. A dynamic group of organizations and individuals created a comprehensive program to help Afghan refugees settle and thrive in St. Louis. The Afghans who recently came to the United States are legal immigrants with Special Immigrant Visas.
What’s special about this group of people is that someone in the family worked alongside U.S. troops during the conflict in Afghanistan. When the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban In August 2021, their lives and the lives of all of their family members were at extreme risk. They left behind everything they owned and everyone they knew. They barely got out of Afghanistan alive.
The Afghans I’ve met during our two years of production are intelligent, educated, hard-working, generous, and kind. I’m honored to have met them and to now call many of them my friends. It’s been one of the most rewarding experiences in my career.
I hope that “Gateway to a New Life” inspires all of us to see the humanity of refugees and immigrants and to understand that, in some cases, they’ve risked their lives to come here. The film in no way offers a solution to the complex issue of immigration in our troubled times. But it is my hope that the film inspires all of us to seek and be guided by the truth of the stories of refugees and immigrants, and to recognize how much they can contribute to our communities.
