Ellis Island was America’s largest immigration station, processing more than twelve million immigrants between 1892 and 1924. Increasingly restrictive immigration laws sharply reduced who could enter the country, and during World War II the island was used to detain people of German, Italian and Japanese descent. It later became a holding center for potential deportations before closing in 1954. The main complex reopened as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in 1990, while many of the hospital buildings remained abandoned.

I first went to Ellis Island in 1974, when I was seventeen. Steve Siegel and I rowed across New York Harbor to the abandoned island to make a 16mm film. At the time it was an adventure and a ruin; only much later did I understand how much its history of immigration, exclusion and belonging would shape the work I was making.