Citizens of Nowhere: What It Means to be Stateless in the US

The short documentary film “Citizens of Nowhere: What It Means to be Stateless in the US”, produced by What Took You So Long? in association with United Stateless, accompanies stateless persons in the USA. They share memories on how they learned about their status, how this influenced their lives, and how they started taking agency to solve the systematic problem of statelessness and ensure everyone’s right to nationality.

One of the interviewees, Ekaterina,  shares: “When you hear you friends just got back from an oversea trip and you have not seen your family in decades…I have carried with me a kind of a sense of that I failed as a human somehow. I failed my family, I failed myself, I failed society. And the truth of the matter is that statelessness is not an individual’s fault. It is not the fault of a human being that their human right is being violated and nationality is a human right.”

Meanwhile, Philippe remembers: “[…] I only started to ask this question [of nationality] when I was like 18 when I wanted to, you know, go travelling a little bit, go at least to Canada. And I found out you need something called a passport. So that brought up the whole talk of where is it?”

Source: What Took You So Long and United Stateless, streaming in Al Jazeera Media Network DigiDocs UNHCR Nordic and Baltic Countries