Flying saucers and your "Alien Survival Kit" may have been gimmicks of the 1950s media but Work in Progress (1990, 14 mins, 3/4" video), a film by Luis Valdovino, shows how such precepts govern America's immigration policy today. In a deceptively whimsical manner, the film uses montage and collage, flashback and newsreel, draws on Buñuel and Ronald Reagan to convey a lot of facts, and certainly the spirit, behind INS policy and the anti-alien mood of a nation. Under the Table (Canada, 1983, 24 mins, 16mm), directed by Luis Osvaldo Garcia, is a poetic documentary on life underground for illegal immigrants in Canada. Based on the stories of the film's writer, Jose Luis Goyes, who lived clandestinely in Toronto for two years, and an elderly man who has made inconspicuousness a way of life, the film is both lucid and evocative. (Note: screens again Friday, March 20.) Carlos Avila's Distant Water (1990, 28 mins, B&W, 1/2" video), an award-winning student film, is described by critic Steven Goldman in the L.A. Weekly as "a gem of a movie. Set in Los Angeles in 1943, (it) follows a Mexican American boy (Lennard Camarillo) coming to terms with his own manhood and others' racism. Beautifully photographed by Costas Kistos, the movie combines a Spartan neorealist aesthetic with sequences of pure poetic abandon." Louis Hock's The Mexican Tapes: A Chronicle of Life Outside the Law, Part III (1985, 55 mins, 3/4" video): In "La Colonia," an apartment complex in San Diego's affluent north county, some eighty undocumented Mexican people reside, isolated from the surrounding community socially, economically, culturally, and by the fact of their position "outside the law." Filmmaker Louis Hock moved into this community in 1979 and videotaped his neighbors at home and work for the next two-and-one-half years. His observations combine with theirs to create an insider's chronicle of life on the outside in Southern California.