Almost every culture has a tradition of family meals, Klein points out. “By telling these personal, beautiful and inspiring stories, I think there’s an opportunity to get someone to have a little different perspective on one family or a group of people or culture,” he said.

The breakdown of how the team will spend their Kickstarter funding. (The Perennial Plate )

It’s an ambitious project. Klein and his team are asking $50,000 from their Kickstarter: half for the filmmaking and half for their Facebook advertising budget. They’ve currently raised more than half, but still need to raise the rest before their deadline on April 27. It’s a more expensive and overtly political venture than the Perennial Plate, but Klein believes it’s worth it to to break up newsfeeds featuring the same narrative. That homogeneity in news sources is what got us into this mess, he says.

“When you are in a bubble, you tend to stick with the people around you, with the influences you have,” he said. “If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, [it’s] a constant bombardment of ideas that ring true to what I already believe instead of trying to expand my horizons.”

Klein isn’t sure what families he’ll be featuring. He’s looking into families in California, in places like the Bay Area, to get the perspective of families living in sanctuary cities. Klein and Fine live in Minnesota, home to the largest concentration of Somali immigrants in the US, and they’d like to show how Trump’s travel ban and deportation threats (ICE currently plans to deport about 4,000 Somali immigrants) are affecting the population. The project’s aesthetics will likely change and shift over time, but there’s one thing that Klein is already sure of: the tone of the films.

Fine and Klein in Gujarat, India. (The Perennial Plate)

He doesn’t want to play the part of the smug liberal, lecturing people about how they should vote. His main goal, he says, is to show viewers that immigrants share the same traits that Americans, particularly conservative Americans, value: things like hard work, loyalty and family. There are lots of people who have never met an immigrant or refugee, whose opinions on immigrants are shaped by cable TV pundits or Trump’s preoccupation with crimes committed by immigrants. The Perennial Plate team aims to present immigrant families as just another neighborhood family, one who bickers and burns food and laughs together the same way the viewer and their family does.

“I want people to develop a human connection with someone that they might not normally have,” Klein said. If you’ve never met an immigrant from Somalia or Mexico, and all you know is that they’re committing crimes and taking our jobs, Klein hopes his films might change your attitude. “Suddenly you see a film [and] you really like this person's personality, and just thinking a little bit differently about [immigration], that’s all we can really hope for. We hope that spirals into a different way of thinking about the way our government approaches those groups of people.”

“Change is oftentimes pretty vague,” Klein added. “For us, it’s about doing the little piece that we can, and in our case, what we can do is tell stories. And stories are very powerful.”

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