The Choosing America Project is seeking anecdotes from immigrants that it can possibly turn into short films for public screening. The project, which calls itself a “creative initiative” without an affiliation with any organization, doesn’t have a deadline for submissions. A public relations person told me that the project organizers are hoping to get “many stories as soon as possible.”
The project doesn’t want to receive life stories or accounts of the immigration process. Rather it seeks stories of 1,500-4,000 words about a “decisive moment that determined the course of your life in America.” The description of the project says that stories from children born to new immigrant parents are also acceptable. That would open up the project to a lot of English-language learners who didn’t actually move to this country themselves.
And if you’d like to tell your story publicly or encourage someone else to tell his or her story, and you don’t like the guidelines for this project, you might want to instead participate in StoryCorps, a national oral-history project.