There is a tragicomic scene right at the beginning of "Nadie nos mira/Nobody’s Watching”: Nico (Guillermo Pfening), a tall, blond Argentinian man, is sitting on the bench of a typical NYC playground, holding a cute baby boy in his arms. He is surrounded by a group of Latina nannies, who make fun in Spanish about his non-existent ability to change the baby’s diapers, assuming that he is the American father of the child. Except that Nico is neither the father nor American. He is helping a friend out by taking care of her baby while she and her husband are at work. A moment later a child gets stuck in one of the swings and a man calls 911. Nico reveals himself as a perfect speaker of Spanish and warns the surprised nannies about the arrival of the police. In a matter of seconds each of them grabs her respective protégés and disappears from the playground. 

This scene challenges everybody’s preconceptions about social and cultural stereotypes by not totally denying them. There are of course the nannies from south of the border, who reside illegally in the US and are not paid a lot for their work, and they, the unwanted according to many Americans, including their sitting president, have their own preconceptions about a man taking care of a baby. Nico is actually a famous actor in Argentina. The nannies also recognize his face from one of the well-known telenovelas, but Nico has come from Buenos Aires to New York to try his fate in acting in the Big Apple. New York is a tough nut to crack, especially because nobody shows any interest in his career back home. In auditions people tell him that he is either too white for a Latino job or too foreign for a white man’s role. As a producer puts it: Nobody cares if you were a star in your country. Work out, get rid of the accent and darken your hair. 

The film shows us some aspects of immigration from the standpoint of someone who is not in mortal danger. Not the hard, painful and extreme cases of fleeing your own country, but the case of the successful person who has to start from zero in a foreign city. Even a densely populated, multicultural city like New York, the place of a million possibilities, can at the same time be an oasis of utter loneliness. Nico has to take on different small jobs in between auditions, from babysitting to selling Christmas trees. The park benches in the colourful East Coast fall, which usually serve as a backdrop for typical NYC romantic scenes, are Nico’s places of reflection and introspection. The streets of New York, its modern apartments and the vibrant nightlife are Nico’s settings for the scenes that he plays for his family and friends back home, for he is too proud to explain his real situation to them. In the course of the film we learn about the reasons of Nico’s change of location and follow Nico around NYC, where he will slowly be able to form a sober judgement about his life situation. 

In "Daphne”, its eponymous anti-heroine lives and works in London. Daphne (Emily Beecham) is 31 years old and could easily pass for 23, as a flirt points out to her in a bar. She spends her time between her job as a chef in a fancy restaurant and a hedonistic lifestyle with a philosophical touch. Whether it is during the intake of cocaine in a bar bathroom with a potential one-night stand or between hard drinks at a different bar, she likes to throw in Freudian theories and talks nonchalantly about Slavoj Žižek. Daphne sees everything with the clarity of a robot. She does not believe in the fleeting appeal of love or in the benefits of her mother’s affection. There is nothing glittery and mind-blowing about Daphne’s London. We usually follow her in a pre- or post-drinking phase, walking down unnamed streets, buying cigarettes and calling for cabs to her simply furnished bachelorette apartment. Asked erroneously if she is pregnant, she answers: I feel like I’m pregnant with anxiety. In fact, Daphne could be any modern young woman in any big city.

One evening she witnesses an attempted robbery in a small shop and the cashier gets stabbed. There is no apparent change in her physical state when she goes back to work, the casual flirts and analysing life during cigarette breaks, but with time she realizes that the stabbing has been a trigger for a deeper engagement with her otherwise muted inner life. Both Daphne and Nico are people who do not like to be defined and have a hard time accepting help from others. Both of them are fiercely protective of a carefully constructed self, which slowly dissolves and takes other shapes in the anonymity of the big city, and yet they are both given chances to recognize what is dear to them.