Valley Of Tears
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Hart Perry (Director of Photography - "Harlan County, USA"), has documented the lives of Mexican-American migrant farm workers in Raymondville, TX since 1979 when the onion workers' strike broke out. What followed was a fight not only for higher pay but also for equal rights and representation. For 24 years, the county's Mexican-American residents were determined to fight for what is right. "Valley of Tears" is a complex story of the long journey of individuals who endure hardship in order to make a better future for their families. 77 minutes.
The New York Times
Dense, contradictory and distressingly honest, "Valley of Tears" is that rarity among political documentaries: a genuinely thought-provoking film.
By DAVE KEHR
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Variety.com
Years as Barbara Kopple's cinematographer serve documaker Hart Perry well with his magnificent cinema verite epic of campesino struggle in a small south Texas town.
By ROBERT KOEHLER
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TV Guide
This sobering documentary by Barbara Koppel's cameraman Hart Perry begins as a fairly straightforward look at a farm-workers strike that once divided a small South Texas town, but ends as a profound investigation of how racism and a long legacy of unfair labor practices turned a thriving farm community into a virtual ghost town.
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Time Out New York
As gripping as fiction, this examination of race, class and corruption in Raymondville, a small town in south Texas, starts with a 1979 farmworker¹s strike and chronicles its bitter aftermath, still festering nearly 25 years later.
- Maitland McDonagh
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Offoffoff.com
"Valley of Tears" is a look into another world. Or maybe it's our own, if by our world you mean that of the people who run our country. Or the people who do its work it is well worth seeing for the clues it presents to the state of race relations from the 1970s to the present.
By JOSHUA TANZER
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A vivid record of a 1979 strike by Mexican American migrant farmworkers in the onion fields of Raymondville, Texas. Perry's camera lingers affectionately over images of strikers singing labor songs, suggesting Salt of the Earth as a neorealist musical.
- JOSHUA LAND
