“I was waiting for my car to be washed, and this guy handed me a tip,” says Sergio Arau. “In a restaurant someone heard me speaking Spanish and asked me to bring water. I’d say to myself, ‘Do I look like I work here?’”

A well-known journalist, cartoonist, animator, musician and film and video director in Mexico City, Arau was used to being viewed as a serious professional. So it was a shock to discover how little his resume counted in the U.S.

“What happened?” asks Arau. “I had a long career before I came here, and because I didn’t speak English, for the first time in my life I was a minority. No one knew or cared about the work I had done. What’s worse, they didn’t even see me.”

“I was visiting New York with my wife, and they were having a ‘Day Without Art’ to call attention to all the artists who died of AIDS. Suddenly we realized that’s what California needed — a day without Mexicans.”

A Political Statement

Arau’s disconcerting experiences sparked the ten-year journey to create his first feature film, “A Day Without a Mexican,” which he made on Macs and edited with Final Cut Pro. Its premise is straightforward. The movie focuses attention on Latino contributions to life in California by imagining the day they mysteriously vanish. “You make the invisible visible — by taking it away,” says Arau.

The story grew out of the harsh political climate of his early years in America. “Pete Wilson was up for re-election, Prop 187 was on the ballot, and there was a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment in California,” Arau recounts. “I was visiting New York with my wife [actress Yareli Arizmendi, who co-wrote the film with Arau and Sergio Guerrero and also plays its lead character], and they were having a ‘Day Without Art’ to call attention to all the artists who died of AIDS. Suddenly we realized that’s what California needed — a day without Mexicans.”

Venezuela Is Not in Mexico

Arau groans with frustration at the stereotypes his film labors against. “In California they call you Mexican no matter which Spanish-speaking country you’re from,” he says. “It’s insulting to be all lumped together, and you get tired of explaining that Venezuela is not part of Mexico.”

The director instinctively took a humorous approach to his weighty topic. It first came to life in 1997 as a 28-minute mockumentary shot in minidv and edited on a 3/4-inch tape-to-tape editing system. “The short won several awards at film festivals,” says Arau, “and people in the Latin American community said, ‘Finally someone is recognizing our struggles.’” He adds, “Our story applies to all immigrants, not just Latinos.”

When Arau obtained financing to develop it into a full-length film, he decided to turn his mockumentary into a traditional character- and dialog-driven feature.

Many Sources, One Frame Rate

The movie is a fast-paced, multi-layered pastiche. To create it, Arau and his crew shot and edited in 24fps digital video. “Ours was one of the first feature films to use the new 24fps tools in Final Cut Pro,” he says.

“Final Cut Pro is the perfect medium to assemble all the sources we were dealing with — interviews, archival footage, newscasts, documentary material and so on — because we could load anything onto the computer, work with it in Final Cut Pro, and end up with all our video in the same frame rate.”

Arau teamed with experienced editor Dan Fort for a deeper Final Cut Pro skill set. The platform, says Arau, was vital to their success. “The flexibility of our editing environment was very important to us in building this back-and-forth style between the TV-spoof scenes and the traditional dramatic scenes. For example, we were able to use different visual textures to indicate when we went to a flashback or stock footage.”

Next page: An Editor’s Dream