American Baghdad
El Cajon, a city east of San Diego, holds one of the largest concentrations of Iraqi refugees in the United States, most of them Chaldean Christians who left Iraq after the 2003 invasion and the sectarian violence that followed. This short film profiles families who resettled there, sitting with them in living rooms and at kitchen tables as they describe what they left behind and what daily life looks like now: finding work, raising children who are growing up American, and holding onto language and church traditions that do not travel easily. Interviews are cut together with footage of the neighborhood itself, storefronts and community gatherings that show how a displaced community rebuilds something like a hometown inside another country. The film does not dramatize the refugees' arrival with reenactment; it stays close to the people talking, letting their own accounts of the war and the move carry the story. It is a small, specific portrait of one place, El Cajon, rather than a survey of the broader Iraqi refugee crisis.