America Unfiltered: A Film Exploring the Soul of a Nation

By Robin Stern, PhD and Marc Brackett, PhD

America Unfiltered: Portraits and Voices of a Nation is a journey through the fractured, fragile, and fiercely beautiful landscape of America’s identity. Created by Directors Horacio Marquínez and Kirill Myltsev, the film offers something rare: an unguarded portrait of who we are, told not by pundits or politicians, but by the people themselves.

Marquínez and Myltsev, themselves immigrants, one from Panama, the other from Moscow, traveled from California to New York, through dusty crossroads and quiet towns, across church steps and kitchen tables, asking one deeply human question: What does it mean to be an American?

They were met with willing people, ready to answer the question and share their stories. Strangers welcomed them into their homes, offices, stores, and places of worship and into their grief, joy, anger, and hope. They were invited to services and Thanksgiving dinners, shown family photos, and handed truths too often filtered out of the national narrative.

Each face becomes a document of lived experience. And each complex voice is held with reverence. The result is not a tidy thesis, but a soulful mosaic, comprising portraits of farmers and artists, veterans and dreamers, skeptics and believers, all wrestling with the idea of the essential question. America, their way.

The film is cleverly interwoven with stunning black-and-white still photographs and portraits that complement and expand the depth of the characters more effectively than straightforward color cinematography. It is a powerful and poignant choice by the Directors.

What made this project so resonant was the diversity of opinions, combined with the emotional honesty of those who shared them. These weren’t interviews, they were encounters. And in each story told, there was room for contradiction, confusion, and hope.

What the filmmakers discovered is something we often forget in the churn of the news cycle: most people, regardless of their political or geographical affiliation, are all striving for the same things. They are parents worried about their children, workers proud of their craft, individuals carrying generational stories of migration, trauma, resilience, and faith. When given the space to be heard, they reveal something luminous and sacred in every frame.

America Unfiltered invites us to do something harder and more necessary: to listen without filtering for agreement. To stay present even when the story makes us uncomfortable. To widen the lens and open our minds to every story.

There’s a quiet moral urgency underpinning the film, not the kind shouted from podiums, but in the idea of everyday acts of empathy. The courage to listen and the grace to disagree without dehumanizing by making room “at the table” for stories that don’t mirror our own.

America Unfiltered traces our divisions us by asking the viewer to consider this: What if being American isn’t about sameness, but about the radical act of seeing one another’s humanness fully at a time when the national discourse is the opposite of that: divisive, brittle and cruel brittle, this film offers something quietly revolutionary: humanity, unfiltered.

America Unfiltered can be seen across streaming platforms and cable outlets including: Amazon, Hoopla, and Tubi.

Marc Brackett is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a professor at Yale University’s Child Study Center, and the author of Permission to Feel and Dealing with Feeling.