Paraiso Travel was introduced as the steamy Latin film of the year and already a box office hit in its home country, Colombia. From this I was expecting an exotic romance between these two young Colombians as they travel to New York. I was so wrong. More than anything, this film is a disturbing spotlight on immigration. In Colombia, the young couple and a group of about 10 other Colombians meet with a “travel agent” and pay a huge amount of money for their trip to New York. Its sold as an all-inclusive, first class trip but immediately becomes a nightmare.
The immigrants are robbed, raped, forced to live in awful conditions, risk their lives forging rivers, and only the lucky survive all the way to New York. The saddest part of this whole story is that many of these immigrants were not poor in Colombia. The main character, Marlon, had a loving family in a big house that wanted him to go to the university. He put himself through all this suffering simply on the whim of his girlfriend, Reina, who he loses the first night he arrives in New York.
This was a tragic but beautifully made film that deserves to be screened throughout the US if only to force audiences here to acknowledge the plight of Latin American immigrants. Paraiso Travel isn’t just a painful social commentary. It creates beautiful relationships between its characters and immerses even a New York audience into a previously unknown world within their city.
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