A happy hymn to all things Hellenic, producer-derictor Maria Ilious’s The Journey is the loving told, meticulously reearched story of how the 400,000 Greek immigrants who flooded through Ellis Island from the 1890s to 1920s played a key role in making American great without losing sight of who they were and from whence they came. Fanning out from shoshine parlors and street vending in NY to Massachusettes, New Hampshire,Chicago,Detroit and beyond, the first wave of greeks who arrived in America had to pvercome prejudice from the U.S goverment, which innitially classified them as Orientials, to the ku Klux Klan, who saw them as not the quite white. Marrying dazzling archival footage to the picaresque narration of a dozon or so Greek scholar,historians, politicians, and artists, The Journey is a celebration of Greece and a tribute to the success of Greek Americans.
