REVIEW: If I Could Stay – Documentry
If I Could Stay, a documentary film by the producing and directing team of Theo Rigby and Florencia Krochik tells the complicated deportation struggles of two women, one from Peru, Ingrid, and one from Mexico, Jeanette, who found safety, moral support, and above all, sanctuary in the Unitarian church community in Colorado. It was encouraging and heartening to see a Christian church play such a significant role in the complicated lives of these two women. But not surprising.
The Unitarian Universalist Church was in the vanguard in the anti-slavery, abolition movement before and during the Civil War. They are an enlightened and progressive church that embraces not only Christianity but all faiths.
Their symbol is the flaming chalice that represents communion, sacrifice, and service.
Both filmmakers, Rigby and Krochik, have produced many films on the subject of immigration, deportation, and the emotional perils of living under the uncertain, racist, anti-immigrant Sword of Damocles, that hangs over the heads of people like Ingrid, Jeanette, and their families.
The story of the two women in sanctuary is a compelling and important one, often filled with genuine moments of life-affirming love and local community support for the two women.
But paradoxically, If I Could Stay, is also a grim reminder of the over-arching cruelty, and madness we find ourselves in now, which dominates our daily national headlines.
After watching If I Could Stay, I kept asking myself: “How did we arrive at this dark point in our history where we are on the verge of becoming a Third World, fascist, dystopian nightmare of a country?”
It all started when Donald descended that Golden Escalator in 2015. and described Mexicans coming to America as drug dealers, rapists, and murderers.
But to truly reflect the real symbolism of that moment, he should have been seen ascending from the Basement of Hell engulfed in a stinking fog of sulfur.
Is this our Apocalypse Now? We have masked ICE Men thugs terrorizing innocent Hispanics in their so-called search for “the worst of the worst”.
We have for-profit detention centers (concentration camps) springing up all over the country, and shamefully, one of “the worst of the worst” is right here in Dilly, Texas, not too far from my homebase of San Antonio
Have we forgotten:
- The Palmer Raids of 1919
- The Asian Exclusion Act of 1924
- The Internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942
- Operation Wetback in 1954
Have we forgotten those other “rhyming” racist, anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, White supremacist legislation
Aimed at oppressing, excluding, and, suppressing the rights of “The Other”?
The stories of Ingrid and Jeanette ended basically unresolved, because If I Could Stay ends with the beginning of the Trump Second Reich in 2024, and his mass deportation “pogrom” engineered by that odious, skinhead, jackal trying to pass for a human being, Stephen Miller.
However, the worm is beginning to turn. Recent reported and documented atrocities, executions, abductions, illegal deportations, acts of torture in detention centers, and the forced separation of children from their mothers by Trump’s ICE goons has caused Americans to protest these Gestapo tactics by the ICE Men in growing numbers and intensity.
If I Could Stay, a hopeful film gifted to us by the filmmakers, Theo Rigby, and Florencia Krochik, is an intimate portrait into the sanctuary oasis provided to Ingrid and Jeannette by the Unitarian Universalist Church, whose clergy and members are guided by what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”. It demonstrates that even if history often rhymes in misguided ways, sometimes it can rhyme with the pure poetry of compassion and justice.
If I Could Stay Premiered on PBS Stations,PBS.org and the PBS App on June 1, 2026