In the early fall of 2021, as COVID-19 cut a deadly swath through the country, claiming the lives of thousands of people, many of them seniors, while hundreds of desperate migrants huddled under a Texas bridge, a column that appeared in the Washington Post about older people and immigrants coming together captivated Claudia Myers, professor of film and media arts in the School of Communication. 

The piece recounted how older residents of Goodwin Living, a retirement complex in Alexandria, Virginia, had helped 90 of their caretakers—including immigrants from Cameroon, Haiti, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone—become new Americans by helping them study for the US citizenship test.

The story galvanized Myers and Laura Waters Hinson, SOC/MFA ’07, professor of film and media arts in SOC who is also director of AU’s Community Voice Lab, to codirect The Test. The 16-minute documentary tells the story of how two residents, Jill Miller and her husband, Carl Miller, helped Ghanaian migrant Eric Frimpong, a maintenance worker, study for the citizenship exam. Most of the crew members for the film are AU graduates or students. 

“I found it inspiring at a time when there were so few things in the paper that gave me a sense of hope,” Myers said. “It just really moved me. I decided that it was a story that really deserved to be told.” 

Hinson agreed. “Claudia and I both felt strongly this was a profound story of hope at a particularly dark and politically divided time in our nation’s history,” Hinson said. “It showed how two often marginalized groups—immigrants and senior citizens—could come together across cultures and generations to lift each other up.”

After reading the Post column, Myers contacted the administrators of Goodwin Living and told them she wanted to learn more about the program and the relationships that were developing between residents and workers. For several months, Myers interviewed both.   

Initially, Myers thought her research would be the basis for a fictional movie. “The more I met with people, the more I started to question if that was the right approach because there was something so beautiful and inspiring about the truth of their stories that I started thinking this should probably be a documentary, it doesn’t really need any invention or adaptation,” Myers said. 

The Test, distributed by Little Lion Impact, has won jury awards at the Santa Fe International Film Festival and three others. It has been screened at 22 film festivals, including the Oscar-qualifying Austin Film Festival and the American Documentary and Animation Film Festival.  

The documentary shows photos of Frimpong with his wife and children in Ghana. He explains that he lost his business and came to the US because he couldn’t support his family. He hasn’t seen his wife and kids in eight years and can only visit if he attains citizenship.

In one scene, Frimpong studies at Miller’s kitchen table while she peppers him with some of the 114 questions on the test: What is an amendment? What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful? Who is your representative?

“We went over the questions again, and again, and again,” Miller says. 

Miller ruminates over how older people are treated in the US. In other cultures, the aging are “highly revered, highly taken care of,” she says. “They are taken into the homes and everything. And you don’t find that so much here in the United States.”

An emotional high point occurs when Miller recounts how she told Frimpong she was proud of him for studying so hard, and he responded, “Oh mom, I will be fine.”

“I was so touched by the fact that he felt close enough to call me ‘mom,’” Miller says. “It made my heart happy.”