Filmmakers Eric Byler and Annabel Park set out to make a documentary film about the impact on a community of a law that required police in Prince William County, Virginia, to question anyone they suspect of being an illegal alien. What the filmmakers didn’t expect is that they would be dragged into the center of the debate, a discussion that began on radical blogs and continued onto the documentary’s YouTube channel. It’s this participatory role of the documentary in its own topic that makes 9500 Liberty a new kind of film — a real-time documentary. But the participation of the filmmakers also confuses the movie’s focus and makes the overall piece feel like a rough cut of a movie that got out of hand.

9500 Liberty begins conventionally enough, with the filmmakers setting the context for a debate raging in Prince William County over immigration. The politics look similar to other immigration battles popping up around our country, from Farmers Branch and Irving locally to Arizona. The county in suburban Washington, D.C., saw a sharp rise in its  Hispanic population over a 10-year period in the 2000s, prompting some locals to levy accusations of increased crime, apartment overcrowding, and other municipal code violations. A popular blog, which often hosted heated and hate-filled comment threads, helped galvanize a movement to crack down on illegal immigration, forcing the local police department to check drivers’ immigration status if they had probable cause for the search.

The phrase “probable cause” is the issue. Hispanics in the community grew fearful of racial profiling, and families worried that routine traffic stops might lead to deportation and the breaking up of families. But the film takes an interesting turn when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights steps in, uncovering that the Prince William County law was drafted by a national organization called FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform). By this time the filmmakers had also been posting much of their footage on YouTube, creating a gathering place for people who opposed the new immigration law. The Commission on Civil Rights called in the filmmakers to testify, pushing them into the context of their own film.

It is interesting to see how the distribution means available to filmmakers through the Internet can change the story that they are trying to tell. In this way, 9500 Liberty forges new ground in the documentary genre. Documentaries are often activist pieces — movies that seek to get a particular perspective on an issue out to the public so that it can help shape a debate. But what if a film can shape the debate before it is even finished? It offers a new approach to non-fiction filmmaking, but also questions the old form. Is 9500 Liberty better as a film when it is cut into a traditional 90-minute feature, or when it exists as dozens of clips collected on a YouTube channel?

Photo: Filmmaker Annabel Park becomes one of the subjects in her film, 9500 Liberty, about immigration (Courtesy photo).