During this year’s Montclair Film Festival, The Montclair Pod took the stage for a powerful live conversation with the filmmakers and subject behind BRENDA, a 25-minute short documentary that has stayed with everyone who’s seen it.
Shot almost entirely in Montclair, BRENDA tells the story of a Honduran mother’s harrowing journey to the United States as she sought asylum and fought to reunite with her four children. The woman at the center of the story, Brenda herself, joined us in person, alongside local filmmakers Jasmine Wang and Danny Monico, and Masiel Rodriguez-Vars, Executive Director of the Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence (MFEE), who has been working closely with Brenda and her family.
A Story That Found Its Way to Montclair
As Monico recalled, BRENDA began serendipitously. He and Jasmine were shooting a separate documentary when they met a woman who insisted they needed to hear Brenda’s story. “It was kismet,” Monico said. Once they learned that Brenda, a mother living in sanctuary inside a Montclair synagogue, was part of a larger network of over 100 immigrant families navigating similar challenges in town, they knew they had to make this film.
From Honduras to Montclair: A Journey of Survival
Through a translator, Brenda shared that she fled Honduras after receiving death threats for speaking out against the government. Gangs had taken over her neighborhood. Facing an ultimatum to leave within 20 days or be killed, she made the excruciating decision to escape with her young son, Josue, leaving her three daughters behind. “They don’t come to the United States to pursue a dream,” Brenda said. “It’s not really a choice. They come because there’s no other option.”
A Town Rallies
Rodriguez-Vars described how she first met Brenda in 2021 while distributing COVID vaccine information at Glenfield Park. That encounter led to Brenda becoming one of the first families in MFEE’s Navegadores program, an initiative that connects Montclair volunteers who speak Spanish or Portuguese with multilingual families new to the community. The goal, Rodriguez-Vars explained, is to help families navigate local schools and rebuild the social networks so many Montclair residents take for granted.
“Unlike other communities where there’s a large population of multilingual learners, suburban towns are really hard to navigate when you don’t speak English,” she said. “We’re trying to recreate those networks through the program.”
Community, Connection, and Courage
The night’s discussion reminded the audience that immigration stories aren’t abstract issues — they’re human stories unfolding right here in Montclair. As co-host Michael Schreiber reflected afterward, “People have lots of feelings about immigration, but it’s always important to remember that these are real people, with real lives and struggles and kids.”
For the audience, the conversation underscored the power of storytelling to bridge divides and bring empathy into focus, a theme that resonates deeply in Montclair’s diverse, globally minded community.
